Digg Swarm is an online visualization of what stories are popular on Digg.com. Digg.com is a user generated news content site where users submit news stories that are interesting to them. Popular stories get “Dugg” to the top by other users of the site, and the most popular stories Get pushed to the front page where millions of viewers can see them. The exact algorithm for getting pushed to the top page is unknown, but it has to do with how many diggs the stories get, who diggs the stories (more active users get more push), and how fast the stories get diggs.
In the visualizations, the users are the little yellow circles and the stories are the big white bordered circles. Lines connect users to stories and stories appear when they are dugg and disappear if they are not dugg for a specific amount of time. Same goes with users. The bigger the story is the more diggs it has and the bigger the user is, the more friends and influence it has. Lines also connect stories that have been dugg by the same user.
Digg Swarm is a focal network that is similar to the focus network that we had to conceptualize on homework 1. I watched for a long time, and I am pretty sure that it does not currently implement triadic or focal closure. However, this would be a neat (and useful) thing for it to represent in the future. I think the most beneficial thing to see now is that how big stories attract even more users faster. (For example, try to find the stories that are the most popular - easy - just look for the one with all the little yellow circles rushing to it at once!.) Digg Swarm would be a very useful model for researchers to model networks off of in future studies.
Check out the visualization here:
Do you have any links or references that define focal closure? Wikipedia and Google came up little sparse - I found a definition for triadic closure elsewhere on this blog, but not focal.