Social networking – the link is the thing…

DM Review – The Link is the Thing, Part 3
By Richard Hackathorn

A partial list of references mentioned in this three part series:

Valdis Krebs :: Post-Merger Integration, Scale-Free Networks, The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia, Small World Project – Columbia University, Norah Jones, Citations: Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications – Wasserman, Faust (ResearchIndex), DM Review – Farming Web Resources for the Data Warehouse , The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web – Page, Brin, Motwani, Winograd (ResearchIndex), Pagerank Explained Correctly with Examples, Pagerank Explained. Google’s PageRank and how to make the most of it., SIENA, Associative Link Analysis resource site.

Part 1 of this article (August 2003 issue of DM Review) reviews the work in network analysis of complex systems, particularly the recent research into the small-world (SW) property, aristocratic-egalitarian (A-E) distinction and tipping points. Part 2 (September 2003 issue of DM Review) applies these concepts to the business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) fields with a new methodology called Associative Link Analysis (ALA) by discussing the translation of typical warehouse schema into an associative graph form. This article, Part 3, the final in the series, describes several metrics for analyzing graphs, strategies and tactics based on the SW property, and implementation issues…

Additional reading on a few of the concepts introduced in this three part series:

“Small World Property”: Locality, Hierarchy, and Bidirectionality in the Web (ResearchIndex),
“Small World Architectures”: Multiple Scales in Small-World Networks (ResearchIndex),
“Tipping Points”: Tipping Points,
“ER Schema”: A Formal Framework for ER Schema Transformation – McBrien, Poulovassilis (ResearchIndex).

[judith meskill’s knowledge notes…]

Great collection of substantive resources on network analysis. I wish that more of the designers of services like Ryze, LinkedIn, and the like had read and absorbed these lessons before launching into software development. I see little evidence that they have and with the lemming like rush of VC money into this space, I’m betting on a mini-bubble popping in the not too distant future.