One of the most talked about new web applications today is a service called Twitter. A dead-simple social messaging application, Twitter has been the subject of recent controversy in the blogosphere. Some like it. Some don’t. Some just wonder how we will get anything done.
What is Twitter? From Medialoper:
If you’re not familiar with Twitter, it’s […]

While this article doesn’t directly discuss information cascades, Procter & Gamble became the first to launch an advertising campaign aiming to calm consumers over recent contaminations in pet food blamed for the deaths of thousands of pets across the United States. They purchased full-page advertisements in 59 daily newspapers.
This situation, when examined on a […]

http://www.swampfox.ws/south-carolina-lured-away-the-director-of-the-university-of-connecticuts-global-fuel-cell-center/
 This article looks into the potential use of alternative energy and hydrogen fuel cells.  The future success of alternative energy seems to rely heavily on its publicity, public appeal, and opinion.  The article explains that the state of Connecticut is the one state that has been really trying to spur the development, manufature, and use […]

http://waderoush.typepad.com/twr/2005/03/james_surowieck.html
The article written by Rhody about a talk given by Surowiecki bring up a few valid points about the benefits and problems brought about by the ability to share information between people. He begins by mentioning that information taken from many sources can provide a diverse set of ideas that will greatly aid in solving […]

When dealing with any large network of users, be it social, technical, or some amalgamation of both, a discussion of network externalities will often yield fruitful results. As peer-to-peer filesharing systems are often large in both scope and impact on modern computer users, one might expect that there would be a host of literature discussing […]

           A recent article called “France Launches Digital Library”  by Helana Spongenberg of BusinessWeek.com discusses Europeana, a digital library that France is introducing as its supplement to the European Digital Library. What struck me in reading this article was that the creation of Europeana was described as a substitute for US search engines.  The article discusses how major search […]

A Simple Model of Fads and Cascading Failures

Maximizing the Spread of Influence through a Social Network (click on “Full Text: PDF” to view article)
Our class discussion of information cascades has mostly centered around a scenario in which individuals receive information about a particular choice and make a decision based on their information as well as […]

The Odd Couple of Social Networking
In early March, a router giant, Cisco, purchased Utah Street Networks, the owners of a social networking site tribe.net. Cisco did not buy the actual social network community (which is comprised mainly of those involved in the Burning Man, but rather, the underlying technology so that they can focus […]

On March 20, 2007, Jaxtr launched the public beta version of its free widget, which “allows users to connect their personal phone to their digital personality.” Users can put this widget on their favorite social networking sites and blogs such as Blogger, Craigslist, eBay, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia. During the […]

Google has launched a new AdSense/AdWords beta feature called “Pay-Per-Action” that lets advertisers to pay for ads only after a user clicks on the ad and completes a certain “action”, such as buying a product or filling out an application. This seems like a natural progression from the newspaper-style cost-per-impression, through the internet’s pay-per-click […]