Exercise 10.1 Social networks case study

Since we have a fine collection of artefacts from our own learning community in this subject, use the references to guide your directions AND figure 1 on mapping the social network as a set of nodes.

As the diagram and grid shows:

James is followed by Sarah and Andy

Sarah is followed by James and Andy

Andrew is followed by James, Sarah and Tyrone

Tyrone is followed by James and Sarah.

If you look at the blogs of the various blue pod members, all of us has a different view of what is a follower and a followee. My definition just looks at each blog and notes the followers as claimed on the site. However, if you also make a person a follower if they posted a comment (but did not register as a follower) then the diagram looks very different. I tended to comment a lot on the main Blue POD site and also on the blogs of the other members but I didn't register as a follower. Therefore the diagram makes my communications minimal and my contribution seem small (and I don't think it was).

The tricky part is deciding whether those followers who are not in Blue POD should be included. This depends on the context of the 'following'. Blue POD activity was based on the CIO recommendation scenario. It had a clear purpose in bringing us together. My (and others) following of non Blues blogs was to ensure that I was up to date with the course work and to see what other students' responses were to the same questions.

If I try to reconcile the nodes proposed by my diagram, I think it is a very simplistic view of the nature of the interactions. I suppose the exercise would be useful in tracing 'pass the parcel' communication scenarios or decoding 'swarm behaviour' but it did not provide much help in documenting how Blue delivered their award winning recommendations (lol).

I think the diagram could be improved by putting arrow heads on the lines to indicate 'flow' and maybe colour coding to designate roles or sub groups and PODs outside the group that contributed. Sarah included follower outside of the Blue POD and I think her effort was better for it.

Exercise 8.3 Data portability, FOAF and the Semantic Web

How does the FOAF tag form part of the Semantic Web and Web services via social networks?

When data goes into a web interface repository, it is either manually or automatically tagged so that it is 'positioned' within the semantic web. While some may see this as an invasion of privacy, the benefit is that the more information the users offer about themselves via forms, polls, profiles etc., the more powerful will be the associations made using the FOAF idiom.

In order for the search engines to make sense of the gigabytes of free data keyed into the web each hour, they must make a call on connections and expected outcomes. If I compare my facebook page of today, I find it is infinately richer than when I created it only a few months ago. This is because the semantic web databases have processed my information stream continuously and as I make choices about which friend to accept and on which to remove, at the same time I'm telling the Semantic web a bit more about myself.

In return, the semantic web is saying 'Oh - I didn't know you cared so much about that person, issue, image,sound file, youtube clip etc. But now that I know that new information, here's a whole lot of new information/multimedia/memberships that (because of your recent choices) should be even more useful to you than last week's.'

If we 'get into the code', the metadata of the discrete webpages (and the server logs that describe our activity) we consume, reveal very accurately what sort of person we are. The FOAF tags not only broadcast our identity through syndicated sites but distill our choices into XML strings - and if we are to truly harness the power of the web - that's the way it should be. I'm not afraid of big brother.