Instagram produces far more engagement than other social media sites for brand advertising.
http://blogs.forrester.com/nate_elliott/14-04-29-instagram_is_the_king_of_social_engagement
The Anternet: Learn what ants teach us about networks in Deborah Gordon’s TED Talk
Ecologist Deborah Gordon studies ants wherever she can find them – in the desert, in the tropics, in her kitchen … In this fascinating talk, she explains her obsession with insects most of us would happily swat away without a second thought. She argues that ant life provides a useful model for learning about many other topics, including disease, technology and the human brain.
OKComrade Is Exactly What You Think It Is
“OKComrade
Internet use predicts your politics
Scarborough consumer data suggests that the way you use the Internet reflects your political preference and likelihood of voting. Their chart shows some interesting patterns: people tracking sports and financial information are more likely to vote Republican; people listening to music or looking for a job are more likely to vote Democratic. 
However, as we all do in academia, if we consider the traditional factors, i.e.age and income, these may be all back to the basics. Read more on Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/05/13/what-your-internet-use-says-about-your-politics/
Paper by Sophia Sullivan, Alina Lungeanu, Leslie DeChurch, and Noshir Contractor entitled “An Agent-Based Model (ABM) of the Emergence of Leadership for Innovation in Multiteam Systems,” was presented at the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Annual Conference, Honolulu, HI
The Document That Could Change the Internet Forever
On Thursday, the FCC approved
Fabian Flöck to present in the SONIC Speaker Series
SONIC Lab is proud to welcome Fabian Flöck, who will present a talk on Monday, May 19, 2014 (3:00pm) in SONIC Lab in the Frances Searle Building room 1.459. All are welcome to attend. To schedule a one-on-one meeting with a SONIC speaker please schedule a time at bit.ly/SonicSpeaker (May 19, from 10 am to 5 pm).
Accurately Mining Collaboration Interactions in Wikipedia to Detect Systematic Social Mechanisms
Several studies have described systematically occurring interaction patterns, or “social mechanisms”, between editors in collaborative writing of Wikipedia articles. These include ownership behavior, editor camps, newcomer rejection and others. Yet, only few of them have been adequately modeled to detect them methodically. The research that will be presented aims to provide such a model, especially finding suited metrics to describe potentially harmful social mechanisms and to understand them better.
The main challenges that arise in this context are (i) to comprehensively and accurately mine data about the underlying editor to editor interactions occurring in an article (i.e., who exactly collaborates with or antagonizes whom?) and (ii) to represent these interactions in an appropriate model capturing all relevant intricacies over time, e.g., a social graph structure; and (iii) based on this, to find correlations of emerging patterns with the appearance of explicit indicators for these mechanisms.
The talk will cover how we already collected relevant social mechanisms from the literature and successfully tackled the data mining challenge, providing novel raw data to infer editor relationships. It will then outline our current work on modeling editor interactions and plans how to detect the suspected mechanisms in the data.
About Fabian Flöck
Fabian Flöck is a research associate and PhD candidate at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. Prior to pursuing his academic career, he worked as head product manager for a Social Network based in Hamburg, Germany and as a consultant on web design and content architecture for a creative agency in San Francisco, CA. He holds a Diplom (≈M.Sc.) in Media Studies/ Empirical Sociology from the University of Cologne. His research focuses on how to mine the social dynamics in large-scale collaborative online platforms and how they shape the performance of these systems. This includes research work on socio-technical interactions in tagging systems, crowdsourcing solutions, online communities (such as reddit), as well as his main research topic, studying how certain systematic social mechanisms in Wikipedia can influence content production and how they can be detected and made more transparent.
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Accurately Mining Collaboration Interactions in Wikipedia to Detect Systematic Social Mechanisms
Yahoo Buys Blink, a Snapchat Rival, and Will Shut It Down
A New Private Chat App for Applebee’s Customers
http://www.psfk.com/2014/05/applebees-private-chat-app.html#!M99ND A new app was released that allows anyone inside an Applebee’s restaurant to anonymously chat with one another. “The app itself may seem a little ridiculous, but it points to the very real possibility of restaurants – or any establishment, for that matter – creating their own location-based social networks, which they can take advantage of by using it to send promotional messages or create in-store communities, and they can even throw in perks and incentives for members to join in.”
Molecular, Neural, Bacterial Networks Provide Security Insights
The robust defenses that yeast cells have evolved to protect themselves from environmental threats hold lessons that can be used to design computer networks and analyze how secure they are, say computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University. Read More at: http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news/2014/05/molecular-neural-bacterial-networks-provide-security-insights