Collab-Or-Ate

The WSJ article “Genes and the Friends you Make” reports that genetics play a factor in the structure of your social network, specifically the in-degree, transitivity, and the centrality of your network:

The scientists looked at how many students in the longitudinal study named a given student as a friend, which it termed “in-degree” affinity; how many students a given student named as friends (out-degree affinity); what the odds were of a given student’s friends knowing each other (transitivity); and how central or peripheral to a network a given student might be (centrality).

The researchers found that in-degree, transitivity and centrality are “significantly heritable.” This means that your genetic background may help determine not only how many people count you as a friend, but also how many of your friends are friends among themselves. This sheds light on the kind of social network you inhabit, and whether your presence is central to it, or not.

There are related studies that find that levels of innovation, obesity, smoking and depression can be linked to who you are friends with. If we break apart the causal link between genetics and innovation/obesity/smoking/depression research outcomes, we might find that it isn’t your genes, but rather your genetically pre-determined set of friends that are influencing the course of your life. Better break the genetic determinism by stepping up that Facebook friending!

Glad to hear at least one company that doesn’t make money yet is able to get venture funding! Twitter, which turned down an offer from Facebook, is getting more venture funding, according to this Washington Post article. The article is little more than a rumor, but interesting. Apparently, Twitter has passed Digg in number of weekly visits.

I maintain that because Twitter’s earliest adopters were adults, not teenagers or college kids, it is in a much better position to find a profitable business model compared to other social network services. Not only are Twitter’s core users in the business of web 2.0, they are using Twitter to support their work. It is only a matter of time before Twitter figures out how to make money off of that.

As I fill my calendar with 2009 project meetings, it is good to be reminded about good meeting practices:

• Whoever calls a meeting should be explicit about its objectives.
• Everyone should think carefully about the opportunity costs of a meeting. Do you really need one?
• After productive or unproductive meetings, assign credit or blame to the person in charge.

Please, don’t just call a meeting and hope the magic happens. Take charge and take personal responsibility for meeting its objectives, whatever they are.

From NYTimes’ Preoccupations column, 1/17/09

The NYTimes has an article today about how the Obama administration (official now!) could make careers in academic research easier for women. The main suggestion is to change the policies around allowing family leave while on research grants. In the familiar theme of Obama-will-fix-everything-wrong-in-this-world, the article is optimistic that good things are about to happen. But also, a lot has happened within our lifetime already!

In 1973, only 6 percent of the Ph.D. scientists employed full time in academia, business or elsewhere were women; by 2006 the number had risen to 27 percent. Over that same time frame, women’s share of full professorships in the sciences quadrupled, to about 20 percent.

Encouraging girls and women to pursue science and technical careers is very important to me, because I was encouraged by high school teachers and summer programs (not to mention my parents) to pursue math and science. In college, I majored in math, but not before dropping out of a physics major, where I had became discouraged and felt ignored. (Apparently physics is a real problem area for retaining women.) Math (applied math, specifically) was a good choice for me in the end and I think everything definitely worked out. But if I had not had that early encouragement in high school, I wouldn’t be working where I am now, or doing what I’m doing.

For the sake of supporting women’s choices throughout their career, let’s hope Obama makes some key changes and appointments.

This is not the most interesting blog post, but I need to make public my personal notes on what papers were interesting at HICSS. So here is the list, with my short summaries and links to the papers.

Agents of Diffusion – Insights from a Survey of Facebook Users, Rebecca Ermecke, Philip Mayrhofer, Stefan Wagner

On viral adoption on Facebook

Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter, Courtenay Honeycutt, Susan C. Herring

How people use the @ reply mechanism in Twitter. Did you know that 30% of messages get replies?

A Conceptual and Operational Definition of ‘Social Role’ in Online Community, Eric Gleave, Howard T. Welser, Thomas M. Lento, Marc A. Smith

A theoretical paper on determing social roles in an online community. Best paper award for the Track.

Hello Stranger! A Study of Introductory Communication Structure and Social Match Success, Daphne R. Raban, Stephen T. Ricken, Sukeshini A., Grandhi, Nathaniel Laws, and Quentin Jones

Social introductions.

Mycrocosm: Visual Microblogging, Yannick Assogba, Judith Donath

Overview of the mycrocosm service.

Cyber Migration: An Empirical Investigation on Factors that Affect Users’ Switch Intentions in Social Networking Sites, Cheng Zengyan, Yang Yinping, John Lim

What triggers migration between different social network sites?

A Life Cycle Model of Virtual Communities, Elham Mousavidin, Lakshmi Goel

The lifecycle and stages of an online community

Knowledge Workers and the Realm of Social Tagging, Ralph Boeije, Gwendolyn L. Kolfschoten, Pieter de Vries, Wim Veen

Social tagging by workers.

Groupware for Design: an Interactive System to Facilitate Creative Processes in Team Design Work, Arjun Venkataswamy, Rajinder Sodhi, Yerkin Abdildin, Brian P. Bailey

How do you design groupware that is specifically supposed to support the creative process of team design work?

Cultural Diversity, Perception of Work Atmosphere, and Task Conflict in Collaboration Technology Supported Global Virtual Teams: Findings from a Laboratory Experiment, Souren Paul, Sumati Ray

I already blogged about this one and how it is an interesting finding about conflict and cultural differences in distributed teams.

Blogs Are Echo Chambers: Blogs Are Echo Chambers, Eric Gilbert, Tony Bergstrom and Karrie Karahalios

Are bloggers talking to like-minded bloggers?

Employee Adoption of Corporate Blogs: A Quantitative Analysis, Sunil Wattal, Pradeep Racherla, Munir Mandviwalla

Model of when/why employees start blogging.

Monetizing the Internet: Surely There Must be Something other than Advertising, Eric K. Clemons

Great title and interesting discussion of some other possibilities for making money on the internet, besides through advertising.

To share an example of content on IBM’s Beehive, here is a hive five I made about Hawai’i, while there for HICSS.

5 Things to do on The Big Island of Hawai'i

When you aren’t busy at a conference, there are a few things to keep you entertained in Hawai’i. If you are looking for a tourbook, Hawaii The Big Island Revealed is fantastic!

1	See the active volcano, Kilauea! We went to the Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park and hiked Kilauea Iki, which was awesome, even in the rain. Then we took a Doors-Off Helicopter tour over the entire area — very cool!!
2	Hike down into Waipi’o Valley for amazing views and a black sand beach.
3	Sea kayaking and snorkeling day trip. We went to Kealakekua Bay and saw dozens and dozens of spinner dolphins while kayaking and then many fish while snorkeling. We rented everything from Kona Boys.
4	Tour a coffee farm and get a free caffeine buzz. We went to this coffee collective and they had a great tour: Greenwell Farms.
5	Sit in a hammock gazing at the ocean. This is the perfect thing to do at the Hilton Waikoloa Village.

hive5 details:

Hive5 shared by Joan DiMicco on January 13, 2009.

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