Second Life, Lada Adamic

From Cory Linden, one of the creators of Second Life

Lada's work is on information flow in social groups, including tracking the prime movers in blogspace. As we think about the next versions of Second Life's reputation and social systems, I suspect we'll have to read up on much of her research. Tim is working on one of the Holy Grail's of computer science -- automated analysis of audio and video data to enable keyword and contextual searches. This is extremely exciting stuff, and when combined with podcasting and other RSS audio and video streams, takes personal broadcasting (and browsing) to a whole new level.

Which led me to Lada Adamic, a researcher at HP [formerly at Stanford where one of her collaborators and colleagues was Orkut Buyukkokten of Orkut fame]. She's doing a lot of research on social networks in the blogosphere, including some stuff that's getting closer to my heart: treating information spread as an epidemic and modelling it using tools and methods coming out of mathematical epidemiology:

Information Flow in Social Groups: We present a study of information flow that takes into account the observation that an item relevant to one person is more likely to be of interest to individuals in the same social circle than those outside of it. This is due to the fact that the similarity of node attributes in social networks decreases as a function of the graph distance. An epidemic model on a scale-free network with this property has a finite threshold, implying that the spread of information is limited. We tested our predictions by measuring the spread of messages in an organization and also by numerical experiments that take into consideration the organizational distance among individuals.

Lots more interesting stuff on her HP homepage:

• Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace
• How to search a social network
• Enhancing Reputation Mechanisms via Online Social Networks (short paper)
• Information dynamics in a networked world
• Information flow in social groups
• Friends and Neighbors on the Web
• A Social Network Caught in the Web

Oh - and Second Life is a vast, fascinating and complex virtual space - I've recently started playing (in/with) it, and am amazed at the complexity and freedom it affords, and the communities that are forming in and around it. If you can shake off the stigma attached with MMO worlds [D&D hack'n'slay, geeky teenage boys] , Second Life is worth a detailed investigation.