Social Media Research Blog

Book Review: Tribes by Seth Godin

I was quite impressed by Seth Godin's small book called "The Dip" so I decided to get a copy of Tribes. The book describes a tribe as: any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader and an idea. It almost sounds like the definition of a tribe is identical to that of a community in the social network literature. The powerful idea in this book is that anyone and yes, YOU! can lead a tribe. Godin describes leaders as heretics who challenge the status quo in organizations. The internet and social media tools today make it far easier for all of us to be leaders and inspire others to do the same in their own workplace, organization, school or non profit. Blogs, social networking sites, self publishing tools and twitter are only a few examples of new tools that are at your disposal. This book isnt a "how-to" manual or a dummies guide to leadership but it presents plenty of examples of how individuals have brought about change. In all the examples one thing that is striking is how true leadership is a lot about communication. Leadership requires us to listen and to facilitate communication in a tribe. Overall it was an average read and I must say the book fell short of my expectations. One problem with the style of writing is that it was more like a series of blog posts on this topic rather than a book. The sections are just too hotchpotch and lack depth. Perhaps it would have served much better as a blog since there were several paragraphs and references where individuals and examples seemed to have been mentioned in passing without much detail. I think the author assumed a lot from the reader in terms of familiarity with both his previous works and the references made. Not having internet connectivity while reading this book was equally frustrating since I could not research further on these examples. If you are already a fan of Godin's work you may enjoy it.

We the Numerati

A quick post: I am almost finished reading "the Numerati" by Stephen Baker. I must say that I had very high expectations from this book and it seems to have come slightly short of it. Dont get me wrong, it is certainly a good book but, it wasn't a very technical book. So many of the topics and ideas presented here might sound quite familiar to someone who is wading in data and algorithms every waking hour. What I really like about the author is the way he treads a fine line between dismissing some of the myths about data miners and highlighting some legitimate concerns in the field. It is a great compilation of interviews and summarizes a number of research topics. A few interesting points/quotes from the book: Be watchful of the fact that in some fields (like analyzing terrorist networks) where lives are at stake, we need to be very very careful. False positives doesnt necessarily mean that it is a non-event. On the other hand, innocent folks can find themselves on terrorist watch lists. Failure can cost lives. From David Sifry's interview in the book -- be cautious of "mistaking correlation for causation". Don't think of privacy filters as add-ons that we can worry about after coming up with the data mining techniques. In Jeff Jonas's words sometimes "repurposing" data can lead to unintended uses. Watch out! Stephen Baker touches upon many different applications and profiles a number of scientists, companies and startups that make up the Numerati. My favorite chapter ofcourse was the "Blogger" and "Terrorist" for its social media and social network related discussions (OK I admit there is a slight bias here :-). And Pranam too is eagerly looking forward to reading the pages that talk about splogs. (I am rather surprised that he wasn't interviewed for this!) Overall, its a good book that caters to a wide audience. But most importantly does a great job at demystifying the Numerati and showing a balanced, informed picture about what we do.

Crowdsourcing Academic Paper Reviews?

The book crowdsourcing has given me inspirations for a number of ideas. There are many examples in this book of how the crowds are collaborating, participating and sometimes even competing to make things better. The part that I find most exciting is to do with citizen science and citizen journalism.

• Take the patent review process for example. Peer-to-patent is a great example of how the crowds can work together with experts to speed up the broken patent system.
• The InnoCentive project that uses the diversity of knowledge from crowds to find solutions to tough research problems.
• How Talking points memo asked its readers to help parse through pages of documentation in the DoJ scandals.
• Assignmentzero and current TV are changing the way we think about reporting and journalism.

These examples make me wonder if we might be able to do the same thing with the academic review process. Academic reviews can be time consuming and lets just say --- "have their own problems". Academic research is built on the idea of sharing knowledge, tools and insights. To ensure their quality, results are scrutinized by a peer-review process. Ultimately, if approved, it leads to a publication. In theory, everything should work the way it is supposed to. 

Like any system there are some practical problems. Conferences can adopt a double blind or a single blind review process. In either case, reviewer incentive and motivations vary drastically -- some are motivated by a sense of giving back to the community, others are just helping organize an important event in their research field, some might just like to see their name on the conference PC list, some like the privilege of reading interesting papers first, others like the privilege of having a say in how the field progresses, some (grad students) are volunteered by their professors -- to list just a few.
Reviewers are never "paid" and often have to find time outside their normal work commitments to fulfill these responsibilities, which may not be easy at times. Well I could write a whole post on this topic alone but that is for some other time....

Following are few ways in which I think crowdsourcing can help reform this system:

• Completely public: One approach is to make the review process completely public. Identity of the authors and the reviewers would be public and this could cause HUGE problems and for practical reasons this might be impossible to implement.
• Revealed Reviews: Once the papers are accepted, only those papers that made it and the corresponding reviews for these papers can be made public --without revealing the identity of the reviewer directly. Readers can comment on the reviewers' review and rate them. They could even write a review themselves if they like.
• Crowdsourced Reviews: The problem with revealing the reviews is the same as that of making the identity of the reviewer public. Subtle points mentioned in the reviews can betray the anonymity of the reviewer. The alternative, which I think is most practical, would be to conceal the reviews but allow readers to rate the paper and write their own reviews. Other users can read the reviews and rate the reviews themselves. The crowd is usually good at reaching a consensus in such systems. This would mean that for all accepted papers we have a pretty accurate judgment of what the community as a whole thinks of the paper. Now the scores of the reviewers can be matched against these ratings.The neat thing about this model is that not just academics, but also folks from industry and other walks of life can read academic papers and write reviews about them. And as the book Crowdsourcing mentions "diversity often trumps ability". More people reading and scrutinizing academic work is good for progress of research.

A point to note here is that compensating a reviewer's time in terms of money is not going to work.I do not believe that money is the motivation for reviewers (the same reason why it did not work with Google Q&A). Free conference registrations in lue of their time would be one way to go. Most often though registrations are paid for by the company or the grant. Finally, some conferences have started inviting PC members for a special lunch. Ofcourse, there is no such thing as a free lunch! :-)

Book Recommendation: Crowdsourcing

I have already raved about this book in my previous posts. Crowdsourcing, by Jeff Howe is a book that came out of a wired magazine article (just like Long Tail) and a blog by the author. I picked up this book almost on an impulse on my return trip from KDD conference in Vegas last month. At first, I thought it would be a lot of the same -- examples seen over and over again..Well, this book was far from that! The book is just fabulous and I really enjoyed reading every page. Jeff Howe does a great job presenting crowdsourcing in three parts: "how we got here", "where we are" and "where we are going". In essence, crowdsourcing is about the idea that "diversity trumps ability". Bring enough people together to take a crack at a really difficult problem and the diverse backgrounds and knowledge that the crowd brings to the table will inevitably outsmart the smartest people who, in some cases, may have been working on the problem for a long time. The author gives several examples from InnoCentive, where research problems are posed for the crowd to predictive markets (like IEM for politics and Marketocracy for stocks) which are much more effective than election polls and fund managers. To understand how some of these work you really should grab a copy of the book. Crowdsourcing is also about how we are now both producers and consumers of information. Prosuming news and media is part of our online activity and be it editing wikipedia, commenting on a blog, uploading or rating a video we are all participating in it (sometimes in surprising ways -- without even noticing that we are!). The book is full of several interesting examples from Threadless.com a crowdsourced tshirt design site to how a punk rock band that marketed itself on myspace. Counterintuitive the way large Newspapers have been thinking, those news sites that have adapted to this new trend have actually benefited and increased online readership. Crowdsourcing makes a big leap in how a billion people connect and someday might even help solve difficult, big problems like cancer and Lou gehrig's disease. This book is really about how crowdsourcing is changing human communication, content production, the way we share ideas thoughts and solve problems and ultimately our culture. Finally, as Jeff puts it... the spin on Robert Putnam's classic work is that we are no longer bowling alone, we are now just bowling online.

Semantic Ecoblogging and Citizen Science

Today during our weekly eBiquity lab group meetings, Joel Sachs updated us on the Spire project. Spire is a research project investigating how semantic web technologies can be used to support science in general and the field of ecoinformatics in particular. During lunch, Joel and I talked about crowdsourcing and how social media and citizen science can help innovation and discovery in scientific applications. Many of the tasks of a field researcher involves tedious and careful logging of the ecology and habitat in an environment. This is exactly where amateur scientists and hobbyists can make a big difference and contribute to science. Most amateurs contribute to such projects, just because they enjoy it and love working on it as a hobby. One example of how crowdsourcing is currently done in Spire is through: Splickr tool: that allows you to query for geotagged photos on Flickr. Spotter tool: "Spotter allows you to easily create RDF/OWL for species observations. It places a button on your Firefox toolbar that calls up a form with fields taken from our observation ontology (Observer, Reporter, Location, Common Name, Scientific Name, etc.)." (description quoted from the site) While reading the book crowdsourcing, I learned of similar efforts by NASA, and Cornell University's Ornithology lab. Many discoveries in science are now coming from amateur researchers -- ant not just from folks with multi-million dollar grants backing them. A few examples from the book are: InnoCentive many open research problems are being solved by a part-time-hobbyist-amateur type researchers. INSPIRE NASA is harnessing wisdom of the crowds to help analyze images The rediscovery of Cozumel Thrasher, a rare bird species by a bunch of amateur birders. And many more examples .... (I really recommend reading the book - it is well written and you will not be able to put it down!) During the meeting and later, we were intrigued by the idea of developing an iPhone app to allow researchers and 'citizen scientists' to take pictures of species in the wild and upload them to spire. One important point here is that often an amateur researcher might not be aware of the scientific name of a species, but given we have enough eyes looking at the data being uploaded, we can divide the task of labeling and categorizing the findings. Citizen scientists can contribute at various levels -- performing field studies, annotating, building ontologies, etc. Since, Spire is a Semantic Web application backed by ontologies, one can now reason over the findings and learn that an invasive species is posing a significant threat to the local habitat. This is the ultimate aim of Spire and to me, this is the killer app for Web 3.0 -- if you really insist on a term like that! For more information on Spire please refer to the following publications.

Book Recommendation: Snoop

Recently, I had read the book Snoop: What your stuff says about you? Is your desk messy? What are the CDs,posters and decoration in your bedroom? Where do you place your photographs? are they photos of your family, friend, pets or world leaders? In this book Sam Gosling talks about what your stuff says about who you are. It is also a nice introduction to basic psychology and take an in-depth look at the "big five personality traits" or the OCEAN model. Dr. Gosling talks about how your personal and work spaces are a reflection of where you are on the OCEAN spectrum. To me, the fun part about this book was constantly trying to evaluate how my own personality seeps through in my spaces. I also kept thinking about all the people I know and what their desks said about who they really are. For those who remember Sam from his talk at ICWSM 2007, you might recall the talk "Personality Impressions Based on Facebook Profiles", which talked about the perception of self vs. perception of others about us. Based on their study of Facebook profiles, like in the case of workspaces and bedroom studies, Dr. Gosling and his colleagues find people are usually pretty good at knowing who you are based on the few clues projected by your stuff -- be it virtual or otherwise. It is a book that promises to teach you how to Snoop! But really, I think it will set you snooping a lot more on yourself (than others), the image your stuff projects and the one you might think you want it to.... For those interested, here is a sneak preview of what is in the book:

Book Recommendation: Groundswell

I wanted to share a quick recommendation: Groundswell, a book by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. The book combines the two Forrester Research analysts insights and experience in social web technologies, it's future and how it impacts the corporate world. The authors describe Groundswell as "A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations" While most of us are familiar with the infamous Dell Hell case, the book has a number of fantastic examples of how companies and celebrities have been overpowered by the collective actions of the masses.  One interesting example in this book is that of what came to be known as the "Streisand effect" when the celebrity diva tried unsuccessfully to get an image of her house "unindexed". The amazing thing is that while companies are still obsessing over targeting influential bloggers in the hopes of never repeating the Dell Hell episode, they are forgetting the simple fact that the Web is far more social today. Take for instance what happened when Digg tried to take down the encryption key -- Digg users revolted and finally Digg had to give in. This book is a must read for everyone in advertising, media, social media, marketing, PR -- heck! I would say just about anyone in the corporate sector should read this book. It is also insightful for social media researchers regarding what is important from a business perspective and how we can offer the right solution/apply  our research on real-world problems. While I am still reading this book, I'm already loving it and wanted to share this recommendation with everyone. This book nicely complements the recent series I have read: "Once Lucky, Twice you are Good", "Here Comes Everybody" and "Sync". A more detailed review is pending... as soon as I can finish the book. Oh, and BTW, a friend of mine gifted me another book "The Social Life of Information" which is also in my to-read pile. It is a bit old, but perhaps you might find it interesting too.

The Trilogy of Social Networks Research in Four Parts

Following are some of the books that I highly recommend for anyone interested in the science behind Social Networks research. I like to call this set of books as the "A Trilogy of Social Network Research in Four Parts".

Linked Dr. Albert-László Barabási is a pioneer in social networks research. The concepts of preferential attachment and scale-free networks were first proposed by Dr. Barabási. This has led to our understanding of how human communication works, fault tolerance in real-world networks and discovery of several algorithms that describe the growth of networks, community formation. Linked is a story of a researchers quest for answers to complex phenomena from the spread of viruses to behavior of hubs. Both Linked and Sync are books that teach us how the simplest explanation is usually the best.

Six Degrees Dr. Duncan Watts (Ph.D. student of Dr. Strogatz) presents an excellent look into the recent discoveries in network theory. The book is a tribute to all the academic work that went behind the discovery of small world phenomena, scale free networks and the theory behind search in such complex networks. I particularly enjoyed the book because being in school and working towards a Ph.D., I can really relate to the author's narration of the trials, tribulations and all excitement (yes!) of grad school.

Sync written by Dr. Steven Strogatz, this book was rated as the best of 2003 by Discover magazine. This book talks about how synchrony emerges from a seemingly random and chaotic nature of universe and nature. Its a true science thriller that touches upon complex topics with ease and finesse. It is an inspiring book that truly reflects the passion of someone who is excited about his work, research. Dr. Strogatz has the ability to engage even someone who may have a very little understanding of the subject and describe complex theories in really simple terms.

Nexus This was an interesting read that complemented the Six Degrees and Sync quite nicely. Dr. Marc Buchanan talks about how networks that seem random are actually quite closely linked. The book is a journey from the early days of social networks research and Milgrams experiment of "six degrees of separation" to the most recent discoveries in Physics, Biology and Computer Science that deal with network theory.

Of these I am currently reading  Sync. I read both Linked and Six Degrees simultaneously and really enjoyed how the two books complemented each other and show how two scientists approach the same problem in very different, and equally exciting ways.

[Update] This post should have really been titled "A Researchers Guide to Social Networks: A trilogy in five parts" with the inclusion of "Tipping point". However, despite being a great book, I felt that Tipping point was not as scientifically in-depth and hence decided to leave it at "A trilogy in four parts". But feel free to include tipping point in this reading list since it is a book that highlights some important ideas and in many ways has made the subject appealing to a vast audience.

Oh BTW, Trilogy here was a reference to the three main underlying themes in these books: scale-free networks, small world phenomena and emergence/Synchronization in such systems.