Mathemagenic

I didn’t take my laptop yesterday, so a quick write up of interesting stuff.

Clustering weblog communities using self-organizing maps by JJ, Fernand0 and others (guys, is you paper online?)

The paper is about use of Kohonen maps to map weblog communities (using data from Blogalia, <200 blogs). My first observation – the algorithm wouldn’t scale. JJ confirms it, suggesting that if someone wants to use it for a larger sample (e.g. weblogs “out where”) they would have to pre-process weblogs to find 100-200 most linked to analyse.

Other points:

• They talk about “stories” not “posts”. I wonder why?
• Observation: “communities are defined by 1-2 “gurus”" Question: How community changes after you released the results? – Makes me thinking about my own, “participative”, research.

Internet habit and addiction in the context of a community website, Michael Mackert (see also summary by Alex)

Survey study of ~900 users of an online community. Distinction between addiction and habitual use. 7 symptoms of addiction

• From findings: habitual users use Internet mainly for work, while addicts use it for leisure.
• Open question: those addicted, do they miss Internet in general or specific on-line community and friends?
• Would be interesting to study when heavy blogging (mine, for example) is addiction and when it’s habitual use :)

From bus talk with Philip Laird: “hierarchical thinking” may be more natural to us then we think (during last week talks with Sebastian I got a feeling that hierarchical thinking is pretty much imposed by educational system and ways our work is organised). Example from developmental phycology: when starting in school or kindergarden kids try to recreate hyerarhical relations they experience with parents (e.g. positioning oneself comparing to others in a specific area) and then slowly learning about establishing horizontal relations. Could be interesting to look for more info on moving from hierarchical to horizontal structures and applying that to our ideas of empowering individuals…

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/03/25.html#a1140; comments are here.

• A Topic Sharing Infrastructure for Weblog Networks
• Notes on my PhD methodology: weblog studies
• In search for a virtual settlement: An exploration of weblog community boundaries (draft)

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