Premeditated Thought

Mapping Your Site's Network

Ken Auletta, in the February 12, 2007 New Yorker, describes ubiquitous public relations man Howard Rubenstein (apparently the man doing the talking for the bland, mild George Steinbrenner of the past few years) as wielding power through a "special talent for bringing his clients together for their mutual benefit."  In Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, Rubenstein would be described as the ultimate network connector.

This got me thinking about my worksite and my notion of site power, the collective power of a geographical location in a company.  In that blog posting, I separated traditional sources of individual power from collective sources of power.   I assumed that a site's network was just the sum (or the union, to get technical) of everyone's personal networks.

However, that does not seem to go far enough.  The posting identified information sharing as a vital determinant of site power.  So how should one go about maximizing site power given individual networks?  Here is what I am thinking of doing:

• Make a map of everyone's personal networks.
• Publish the map to maximize knowledge and use of the networks.
• Identify weak links in the map with limited access to key external power-brokers.
• Cultivate new relationships to strengthen these links.

Superstar Cities: Inequality, Part III

Recently it was reported that more people are leaving cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Seattle  than are moving there.  Where are they going?  To Phoenix, las Vegas, Riverside CA, and, uh, Plano.  This is based on census data that ingores natural increase/decrease or international migration.  It seems that people on the whole are drawn away from cities that seem to be doing especially well economically.  Richard Florida has fun with this argument on his blog.

Not so fast.  What Barone [ Michael Barone, U.S. News and World Report ] fails to consider is that these overall trends mask a deeper demographic shift...

...As Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has shown, the human capital levels of U.S. regions are diverging, and highly-educated, highly-skilled people are becoming more concentrated. New York City attracted more than 250,000 college graduates between 2000-2005, according to a recent New York Times report.  Another indicator of this trend is the rise of what Wharton real estate expert Joseph Gyourko has dubbed "super-star" cities, places  like San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, Boston, Austin, Raleigh-Durham, and Nassau-Suffolk, NY,  which have had 40-plus years of housing appreciation  that far outdistances the national average. Even though Brooklyn and Queens have lost total population, the New York Times recently reported that housing values have gone up another 25 percent in 2006, at a time when most economists say the U.S. housing market is cooling and the overall bubble has burst.

Just like the winners and losers of globalization and the education gap in marriage, a growing disparity in cities will divide them into superstars and also-rans.  Just like people marry similarly educated people, they also want similarly educated people as friends.  Creative people want to hang out with creative people.  As the skilled and educate cluster in superstar cities, this becomes a self-reinforcing trend. 

If this is happening as Richard Florida claims it is, the opposite end of the spectrum can't be pretty.  Cities like Las Vegas, by implication, are populated by an increasing under-skilled and under-educated workforce as compared to the superstar cities.

The irony in all this is that globalization, made possible through leaps in communication, was to supposed to free us from location.  It turns out it is pretty hard to have a beer with someone over the internet. 

Visualizing Social Networks

Yesterday I braved the wind and 20-degree temperatures to walk up to the  Darlene Charneco Gameland exhibit at the Morgan Lehman Gallery. 

This is Attractor from Gameland.

The Gallery explains

Through the images in Gameland, Charneco continues to explore the meeting points of real life and virtual life... In this exhibition, Charneco investigates social networks and the gradual reorganization of information on the web into shareable and intuitively nagivable 3D spaces.  She is inspired by the blurring boundaries between dream and waking activities, the implications of our rapidly increasing interconnectivity and the evolution of an accessible collective memory.

Because of the blustery day, I had the gallery to myself for a time, and was lucky that Darlene herself was there.  In our conversation, she brought up the work of Valdis Krebs, who's software analyzes and displays networks in interesting ways.  Here is analysis of recent Top 10 political books broken down by political-right (red), political-left (blue), and independent (purple).  (map and explanation from orgnet).

The maps are based on book buying data: "Customers who bought this item also bought...". Two books are linked if they are often bought by the same customers. Specifically, we looked at the top 10 political books [in sales, according to Amazon] and their network neighborhood. Our InFlow software created the visualization based on the data alone.

To see more about Valdis Krebs' social network analysis work, check out the orgnet website.  The site describes many practical applications (including my favorite, looking for leaders on sport's teams) and his methodology.