JumpSocial Blog

I suppose there could be a couple of people missing because they are out trick-or-treating.

I’m sure there will be lots of good food for thought on this one. I think this subject matter can benefit from lots of ideas from different people.

SNTTT — Social Patterns and Etiquette
Wednesday 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm, Oct 31 (20071031)
at Pub 101

Event Brief Description: Tim Inkpen Over 13 years in the IT field ranging from non profit and government to private industry. Tim has been studying recruiting and training and the application of social networking. He recently designed the OTI Work Experience Program. Social Patterns and Etiquette Tim will share some ideas that he�??s collected from his research and experience. Open discussion on what we think the rules are.

Event Description: *SNTTT (Social Network Theory Think Tank) — Format: 10m social, 10m talk, Questions and discussion. This regular activity is hosted by Darcy Whyte (Darcy@Siteware.com) of JumpSocial. Contact Darcy Whyte for details about future session locations and times. Ideas and feedback are welcome! Please RSVP to Darcy@Siteware.com if you do not indicate in JumpSocial that you are attending. Also feel free to add Darcy@Siteware.com as a jumpsocial contact. It’s in the 2nd floor of the pub.

Event Interests: No Cover, Talk, Seminar, Cocktail Party, Business, Marketing, Planning, VC and Angel, Mentoring, Technology

Pub 101: 101 York Street, Ottawa, Canada, 613-789-3515

Brief Description of Venue: A 3 Level Pub/Sports Bar/Night Club in the Heart of the Byward market. A Little something for everyone!

Open for lunch and dinner 7 days a week Pub.101 boasts a great menu full of amazing daily specials including 2 wing nights.

Table of Contents:
-) Ottawa Facebook Developer Garage POSTPONED
-) Last Week, TravelPod Redesign
-) This Week, Tim Inkpen
-) Perl Programmer

If you are or know a seasoned Perl programmer, please contact lucl@travelpod.com.

Tim Inkpen of the SNTTT sent me these resources:

http://www.ottawabusinessjournal.com/320767738221139.php
http://www.ottawabusinessjournal.com/320767744774653.php

Book: �??The Social Construction of Reality�?� — Berger

Formula: Michael Hughes formula for measuring the depth of a relationship:

Familiarity (1-10)

Trust (1-10)

Potential (1-10)

Fun (-10 to +10)

Add up the total to get a score. Those people with the highest score are the contacts that you should focus on. This a network application of the 20-80 rule.

SNTTT — TravelPod Redesign / Social Network Theory
Wednesday 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm, Oct 24 (20071024)
at Pub 101

Event Description: TravelPod Usability Review with Luc levesque (General Manager / Founder, TravelPod.com): Participate in an open exercise in design and usability by giving your feedback on TravelPod’s new yet-to-be-launched homepage design. Try their Traveler IQ Challenge on Facebook http://apps.facebook.com/travelpod-challenge/

Presenter #2: Mr. Sanjay Belkhode — Abstract: In our very first session, Sanjay presented Part 1 of the Basics of Social Networking Theory. Since then, many attendees have indicated their desire to see this presentation again. This will be mostly the same presentation as before with perhaps a few changes/additions. You’ll learn more about the different types of social networks and how they relate to real life.

*SNTTT (Social Network Theory Think Tank) — Format: 10m social, 10m talk, Questions and discussion. This regular activity is hosted by Darcy Whyte (Darcy@Siteware.com) of JumpSocial. Contact Darcy Whyte for details about future session locations and times. Ideas and feedback are welcome! Please RSVP to Darcy@Siteware.com if you do not indicate in JumpSocial that you are attending. Also feel free to add Darcy@Siteware.com as a jumpsocial contact. It’s in the 2nd floor of the pub.

Event Interests: No Cover, Talk, Seminar, Cocktail Party, Business, Marketing, Planning, VC and Angel, Mentoring, Technology

Pub 101: 101 York Street, Ottawa, Canada, 613-789-3515

Brief Description of Venue: A 3 Level Pub/Sports Bar/Night Club in the Heart of the Byward market. A Little something for everyone!

Open for lunch and dinner 7 days a week Pub.101 boasts a great menu full of amazing daily specials including 2 wing nights.

Here’s a really cool article on the how content can be filtered. The author likens machine learning to evolution.

http://karmatics.com/docs/evolution-and-wisdom-of-crowds.html

It’s worth a peak.

This message went out to the Think Tank group yesterday:

Table of Contents

1) Wednesday, October 17th

2) Thursday, October 18th, Think Tank is on Thursday

3) MyChannl follow-up

4) Ottawa Facebook Garage

5) Facebook Lockout!

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1. There is an excellent event organised by the Ottawa e-Business Cluster this Wednesday (October 17th) so let’s have the Think Tank on Thursday (18th).� The is called building a better mouse trap and it features Tobias Lütke of jadedPixel. For more information please visit: http://www.jumpsocial.com/index.php?&action=events&c=20071017

==========

2. Thursday, October 18th, 5:30pm at Pub 101: Drupal as a Social Networking CMS with Peter Lindstrom (www.LiquidCMS.ca) - A discussion of The Open Source CMS: Drupal and how it can be used for the design of SN websites. A very brief overview of Drupal followed by a simple demo of how to create a simple custom SN application in 15 minutes.

*SNTTT (Social Network Theory Think Tank) — General Format: 10m social, 10m talk, Questions and discussion. This regular activity is hosted by Darcy Whyte (Darcy@Siteware.com) of JumpSocial. Contact Darcy Whyte for details about future session locations and times. Ideas and feedback are welcome! Please RSVP to Darcy@Siteware.com if you do not indicate in JumpSocial that you are attending. Also feel free to add Darcy@Siteware.com as a Jumpsocial contact.

For details please visit: http://www.jumpsocial.com/index.php?&action=events&c=20071018

==========

3. Thanks to Bill Love of MyDEO for his presentation of MyChannl. It was very informative for me since so many people gave interesting feedback.

To offer feedback please visit: www.JumpSocial.com/blog

==========

4. The Official Ottawa Facebook Development Garage

It is tentatively booked at the Mercury Lounge (56 Byward Market Square, Ottawa, ON K1N7A2, 613-789-5324) for Tuesday, October 30th.

If you would like to show your Facebook application or are thinking about creating one be sure to contact me at Darcy@Siteware.com. Also if you are looking for peer review on your ideas or have anything to share, I’d love to hear.

==========

5. Facebook Lockout!

To all my Facebook friends, I have not removed you from my friends or blocked you. I have been locked out of Facebook. This is obviously an error and is being looked at since I’ve emailed them. Facebook has sent me a note to indicate that the account is now returned to normal but obviously they are still working on it since it’s still inaccessible by me.

This leads me to an interesting observation that there is a considerable vulnerability here. I was locked out without any notice, warning or indication of why. I’ve had friends become alarmed because I disappeared and also my parents call me as I’ve disappeared of my families profiles. Also some of my business contacts that I had in Facebook became inaccessible.

Do you have a copy of your Facebook contact list?

This is interesting food for thought.

Last Wednesday we had another great SNTTT session at Pub 101.

Personally I love the MyChannl Application.

It’s really cool to be able to have relevant video content without having to do an explicit search. The MyChannl system takes information from your profile, searches various sources then presents you with the content.

You can also view videos based on your friends. I’m understanding that it uses votes from your friends for this. I think it should use your friends’ interests to come up with content and use the voting for ranking rather than content selection. Also that if I have viewed a video, it should be listed lower in my list. (The ones that I like will be in my favourites).

What’s your opinion?

Darcy

What can be done to make this site better?

http://www.artschallenge.ca

Thank to Lani and everyone who came last night.

We had about 12 people. I asked Lani to come on short notice and she was happy to come along to answer any math questions that would come up. Given the number of people that couldn’t make it, I was surprised. If people hadn’t have been so busy we would have had a fairly large group.
I went through a paper on Centrality and Aids and also we all shared a few anecdotes. http://www.analytictech.com/networks/centaids.htm

This paper is quite convincing to me that Eigenvector Centrality is a measure of something useful. Of course there is all the argument about how you model a network. (What is a tie etc.)

There is another article I mentioned on Scale Free Networks from Scientific American. It’s mentioned earlier in this Blog.

Darcy

My friend Tim Inkpen sent me this article:

Web networking boom blasts into the workplace
The article is about FaceBook and MySpace and it also talks about the fact that many employers block people from certain aspects of the Internet such as email and FaceBook.

Personally I believe that this is generally bad for professionals who use their social networks to assist with problem solving and to discover information. I’ve been on contract sites where they block Internet access and it interfered with my ability to research.

On the other hand, it’s hard to stomach the idea that the civil service is spending their day cruising FaceBook or dating sites and their salaries come from public money. So I can see why they block many people.

Darcy

Thanks to Mike and all who came!

Mike’s talk turned out to be incredibly interesting. It was over the 10m but nobody seemed to mind given how organized he was an how well he delivered it in the noisy environment at Pub 101!

Tim Inkpen sent this link to me on social stuff: http://www.resourceshelf.com/index.php?s=social+network

Also Mike gave me the source code from his demonstrations on AJAX. Anybody who wants it is welcome to contact me at Darcy@Siteware.com. Demo Code from Mike’s Talk
It wasn’t 100 percent obvious to every person but the significance of AJAX is that it allows web systems to have rich interfaces like Win32 apps. As the Internet and Social Software becomes more and more widespread, it needs to become more usable and more accessible.

Also, he emphasized that AJAX allows you to use the horsepower of the client workstations which is a significant advantage. He even described the impact it would have on your application infrastructure.
Darcy

For those of you who are wondering, it stands for: Social Network Theory Think Tank.

It’s a support group organized by Darcy Whyte that meets roughly once per week. The group meets on different evenings in different venues but we seem to be converging on Wednesdays at 5:30pm at Pub 101 in the Ottawa, Byward Market. The speakers can influence the schedule and venue.

The format is generally a 10m social, 10m presentation and then questions and discussion. The idea is that one could just drop in and be in and out in an hour which is good use of time for a quality business networking activity.

Topics are anything that’s to do with social networks, networks, graph theory or anything of interest to people who want to understand, deploy or use social software systems.

Web 2.0 Lab:

The original intention was to branch the group adding a second area of interest which is the Internet and other programming that is involved with social systems. That could be anything from AJAX to PHP to BlackBerry programming. What seems to be emerging is that we have some speakers with this interest area and others under the network theory side.

Ottawa Facebook Garage:

Also hosted is an official Facebook developer support group. This will probably live in it’s own schedule (likely chained onto the Think Tank schedule).
Darcy

The first SNTTT was on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 at 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm at T.J. Pagoda’s in the Ottawa Market.

We had an excellent turnout for the first session. Sanjay went over a few slides. Some discussion about the Dunbar number came up. One thing I notice is that most people when confronted with the concept of the Dunbar number they debate weather the number 150 is the right number or not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar’s_number

I think the number was calculated with a set of assumptions that would vary. So the claim of 150 isn’t really that important. I think that the fact that there is a limit or a capacity is of interest though. This is especially relevant when talking about networks where the ties have reciprocation. I brought up the example of dance partnerships. If you have too many dance partners, you will eventually get attrition since you’ll be too spread out.

Event Brief Description: SNTTT: Share ideas about face to face and online social networks. Explore and analyze existing examples of social software to see what is currently being done right and what is currently being done wrong. Look for answers and ideas of how to use software to facilitate constructive social networks. Express your opinions and hear about what other people are thinking. Learn about the various technical challenges involved with the production of social sites. Be in the know about what�??s transforming our business and personal worlds.

Event Description: This regular activity is hosted by Darcy Whyte (Darcy@Siteware.com) of JumpSocial and OTI. Contact Darcy Whyte for details about future session locations and times. Ideas and feedback are welcome!

Event Interests: Technology, Mentoring, VC and Angel, Planning, Marketing, Talk, No Cover

URL: Link

T.J. Pagoda’s: 355 Dalhousie Street, Ottawa, K1N 7G1, Canada, 613-562-4966, 613-562-3948, info@tjpagodas.com, Web
Driving Directions: Corner of George and Dalhousie across from the hotel. This is where the Hooters used to be.

Brief Description of Venue: Fresh Asian Ketchen

Other Events for T.J. Pagoda’s

The Facebook Platform Phenomenon - A new viral business opportunity with Luc Levesque

Luc’s presentation was very well received as I had lots of positive feedback and everybody had lots of ideas to share. We had about 12 people. I’m posting the follow up here in case anyone wants to comment. It seems that the traffic situation in the Ottawa Market is not so great on Thursdays just after business hours.
Thursday 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm, Aug 16
at T.J. Pagoda’s

Event Brief Description: The Facebook Platform Phenomenon - A new viral business opportunity Luc Levesque ( Founder and GM of TravelPod.com ) will be giving an overview of the recently launched Facebook platform and will be discussing the exciting opportunities that it presents. Luc will also be discussing lessons learned regarding their Traveler IQ Challenge Facebook app ( recently listed as the #2 most popular app on Facebook ) and how it’s grown to 280k+ users in only 1.5 months. Take our Traveler IQ Challenge on Facebook: Follow the URL in this event at the JumpSocial Web site (or find it in Facebook). TravelPod: http://www.travelpod.com Traveler IQ Challenge on Facebook: http://apps.facebook.com/travelpod-challenge/

Event Description: *SNTTT: Social Network Theory Think Tank.

This regular activity is hosted by Darcy Whyte (Darcy@Siteware.com) of JumpSocial and OTI. Contact Darcy Whyte for details about future session locations and times. Ideas and feedback are welcome!

Share ideas about face to face and online social networks. Explore and analyze existing examples of social software to see what is currently being done right and what is currently being done wrong. Look for answers and ideas of how to use software to facilitate constructive social networks. Express your opinions and hear about what other people are thinking. Learn about the various technical challenges involved with the production of social sites. Be in the know about what�??s transforming our business and personal worlds.

For information don’t hesitate to contact Darcy Whyte at Darcy@Siteware.com

Event Interests: Technology, Mentoring, VC and Angel, Planning, Marketing, Business, Talk, No Cover, Live

T.J. Pagoda’s: 355 Dalhousie Street, Ottawa, K1N 7G1, Canada, 613-562-4966, 613-562-3948, info@tjpagodas.com, Web
Driving Directions: Corner of George and Dalhousie across from the hotel. This is where the Hooters used to be.

Brief Description of Venue: Fresh Asian Ketchen

Thanks to Sanjay and all who attended!

Last night the Social Network Theory Think Tank met at Pub 101 (2nd level) rather than TG Pagodas. Everyone liked the venue (suggested by Sonny Juane) and I can imagine that we will met there frequently. Kelly our server did a great job.
Sanjay continued his discussion on SNT from session 1. The group was very lively and discussion continued. There were new members such as Tim Inkpen who gave many interesting comments on the internet infrastructure and how that could relate to where we’re going.

Luc Lavesque launched an incredibly interesting discussion on what is Web 2.0/3.0.

Sonny and a few others mentioned to me that the once per week for the SNTTT is a bit aggressive.

I noticed Scott Annan was talking up JumpSocial! I guess I’ll have to buy him a beer!