How very timely that I discovered this article today about a group called Rapleaf, who purport to understand how people use the social web by following their “internet footprint.” As a quick aside: I was pretty disappointed after signing up for an account to see what info they had on me—it was hardly complete. A [...]
As part of a larger study I’m working on, I need a way to validate social network measures like size and diversity. For example, if Johnny has 1000 friends on Facebook, you would say that his online social network is much larger than Suzy’s of 100 friends. But “in real life,” does Johnny really have [...]
In case you’re curious what I’ve been reading…
The oil mirage
Good case for NOT drilling for oil off the US coast.
Mechanical Turk: The Demographics
“One of the common misbeliefs about Mechanical Turk is that it is a virtual sweatshop”…Panos says not so. This post provides some demographics (age, gender, and location) for 300 turkers, collected over the [...]
My new research project with Pete Pirolli will be based on the following hypothesis: Diversity of people and information in social networks will lead users to be better at information discovery and sensemaking tasks. This is proving to be quite tricky to set up properly. But we have decided that our “tasks” will be in [...]
In case you’re curious what I’ve been reading…
Facebook Market Research Secrets
Great tips for previewing demographic segments in Facebook (like number of single men in the US).
zengestrom.com: Reboot 10 talk on Nodal Points
This was Jyri Engestrom’s talk on social objects and peripheral vision from Reboot 10. It was really excellent.
Dave Eggers makes his TED Prize [...]
