1950 University Ave, Suite 200
Berkeley, California 94704

(free and open to the public - it would be helpful if you mark attending/watching above).

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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Yahoo! Research Berkeley's Brain Jam is an "almost weekly" speaker series on topics related to media, social media, mobile media, media annotation, and the leftist media. Well, maybe not the last one. To join our mailing list, please visit:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/yrb-bj/

Official Website: http://whyrb.com

Added by mor on January 5, 2007