We will continue with the habit of following Brain Jam with a "Social Jam" - an unstructured social time where you can chat and hang out with fellow researchers, designers, engineers or friendly dictators. Refreshments - and beer - will be served!

(still looking for interns for summer, by the way).

This week in Yahoo Research Berkeley Brain Jam:
Scott Golder (HP Labs)
Digitizing Friendship: Learning from and about Massive Online Social Networks

Friday, Jan 19th, 3pm
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
1950 University Ave., Berkeley.
http://upcoming.org/event/138044/

Abstract:
Studying an online community may seem easy; plentiful server logs and databases make collecting their data almost simple. However, it's not so clear as that; these digital footprints represent only a thin slice of users' lives, making contextualizing and interpreting such data subtly challenging. In this talk, I present results from a study of the behavior of over 4 million users of the Facebook, a popular online social network. The results include interesting temporal patterns and insight into college students' lives, and raise questions about what it means to be a friend in a world where digital tools are woven into the fabric of our social lives. Generalizing from this study, I explore the value and tradeoffs of quantitatively analyzing online communities, and consider ways to more richly characterize individuals' and groups' online social lives.

Bio:
Scott Golder is a researcher in the Information Dynamics Lab at HP Labs. He studies online communities, social networks and collaborative systems and enjoys analyzing such environments as well as designing novel interfaces for them. His previous and ongoing work includes studies of del.icio.us, Facebook, Usenet, email and online gambling.

Personal homepage: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Scott_Golder/

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Upcoming Brain Jams:
26 Jan 2007 – Qingfeng Huang - Spatiotemporal Information Dissemination and Beyond  
2 Feb 2007 – Cathy Marshall (Microsoft Research) - TBD
16 Feb 2007 - Mirjana Spasojevic (Nokia Research Center) - TBD
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Yahoo Research Berkeley
http://whyrb.com