This is a very bare overview of Marc Smith’s talk at The NextWeb [twitter: thenextwebEurope].

Marc Smith wants to understand how social power works. The SocialMedia Research Foundation want to build the quivalent of the Kodak Brownie, which made photography into an amateur activity. What would a snapshot of a hashtag look like? Twitter doesn’t show you the crowd as it actually is. Crowds are happy, or angry, or whatever. “We’re interested in revealing the shape of the crowd.” That’s what NodeXL does.

Marc would like to make a browser that shows not pages but webs. They have Open Source tools heading this way. See some at NodeXLGraphGallery.org, “the Flickr for networks.” They are aiming at Social Scholarship so scholars can navigate social media and understand it. One obstacle: social data are largely owned by the commercial vendors providing the social tools.

“Who’s the mayor of your hashtag?” Social network maps show you who are the key influencers, what are the subgroups, and, crucially, who bridges the divides.

He points to six different types of nets at Twitter. [I missed them. Sorry.] The network of people talking about tax policy is very divide,d as opposed to a community of friends. Paul Krugman’s broadcast pattern (Krugman at the center) is very different from the First Lady’s which consist of a set of communities talking about her. If you know about these six patterns, you can ask what you want and how you can get there.

You can see the Twitter network for The Next Web here.

Categories: liveblog, social media dw