Re: Social Network Metrics (reading for July 22 meeting)

On 20 Jul 2009, at 17:09, Sam Critchley wrote:
> I've had a few discussions with people about taking a more economics- 
> based view and looking at the "network effect" to measure SN  
> efficiency/performance (seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ 
> Network_effect for details, plus I recommend reading Beinhocker's  
> book called "The Origin of Wealth" as a great introduction to  
> network effect and evolutionary economics). This can result in a set  
> of tools which allows administrators/developers to measure  
> empirically the effect of service changes. For example, we could  
> deploy the following useful metrics:

I fully agree on the importance of the Network effect.

I wrote a short essay in 2006 Linking the Network Effect to the  
Semantic Web
"RDF and Metcalfe's Law" http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/rdf_and_metcalf_s_law

Jim Hendler and Jenniffer Golbeck wrote up a longer paper on the subject
"Metcalfe's Law, Web 2.0, and the Semantic Web"
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~golbeck/downloads/Web20-SW-JWS-webVersion.pdf

What would be interesting to look into is the question of how things  
will change with open distributed Social Networks, what we are here  
calling the Social Web. I wonder if measurements such as "number of  
users" of a Social Network will make as much sense, as we are creating  
a global network in which everyone can participate, by just publishing  
a file on their server.

Henry


PS. Since we are speaking about wealth here, Yochai Benkler's book
"The Wealth of Networks" may also be relevant.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth_of_networks/Download_PDFs_of_the_book

Received on Wednesday, 22 July 2009 12:14:42 UTC