Many of the networks discussed during the introductory phase of the class were ones in which the nodes represented humans, and the edges represented social ties. The Internet of Things is a neologism originally coined by Julian Bleeker, a media design and information science researcher, meaning both an environment in which everyday things are passively and ubiquitously connected and able to communicate, and also an abstraction layer on top of the real world in which the connectivity between objects and people can be quantified, and links between the real world objects and relevant (meta) data are established.

The Internet of Things is also a network in which nodes are people, places, things, objects and anything else which you interact with. Edges can be (recent) interactions, or hierarchies you build representing objects which you own or interact with regularly. First of all, let’s focus on networks whose edges represent recent interactions of some sort. So, if real-world objects are tagged somehow, perhaps with RFID Tags or Semacode, your personal network would contain edges from you to all of the objects which you “scanned” for tags and downloaded the corresponding meta data. I believe that (some of) the same lessons we studied in social networks are applicable. For instance, if you and another person have scanned two of the same objects, over time, a third object, perhaps one related to the other two, which was scanned by one person, would be scanned by the other. This is very similar to triadic closure in social networks.

The other type of network I mentioned, in which the edges represent objects in your personal network of objects, can also be very interesting. For instance, if you map every node (which is an object) to the graph in the previous type of network, reverse the (strong) links, and then reduce the first map to nodes with shared (meta) data and above a certain threshold of incoming edges, you could perform a very fast search in a person’s internet of things, but in such a way which creates hierarchies of social importance and interaction, much in the same way Google’s first few results are usually ridiculously popular.

ESV Bible blog had a post today with the social network of the new testament. I’ve inserted a small version of the graph below (large version):

I’m not very religious and have a very limited knowledge in this area, but from what I can tell Jesus is at the top of the heirarchy (obviously) and surrounding him are his disciples (Matthew, John, Peter, etc.) - much like the structure of a large organization, and through them, Jesus connects with everyone else. A more interesting graph would be one that follows the Bible and shows how all the connections formed - in what order and so forth so you could tell if he had all these connections because of his message, or he got his message out because he initially had all these connections. Arguments in the comments could be had over whether Jesus was a salesman, connector, maven or all three, because he really was selling and disseminating an idea at that time.

I don’t want to start any religious debates but I thought this was a very interesting graph. Furthermore, the site that created it, Many Eyes, which judging from the domain looks to be part of IBM, has numerous data sets and corresponding visualizations.

Welcome to the course blog for INFO 204. This is a course which will cover how the social, technological, and natural worlds are connected, and how the study of networks sheds light on these connections.

Topics include: how opinions, fads, and political movements spread through society; the robustness and fragility of food webs and financial markets; and the technology, economics, and politics of Web information and on-line communities.

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