Visualizing Social Networks

Peter Merholz (who coined the word "blog") talked about social network analysis on his site, interviewing Valdis Krebs, who talked about using social network analysis to combat terrorism.

With high hopes, I visited another site run by a different guy, www.NetVis.org, to attempt my own less ambitious social network analysis. After a struggle involving browser and Java versions, bit depths, resolutions, etc, only the demo and home page examples worked—not any of my data. The 3 public data sets I tried failed, resulting in "0" for all variables, with no coordinates for the visualizing stage to draw. It drew a little yellow dot. (See screenshot).

So I clicked on Feedback to ask what the heck was going on. It popped up a window with a form. Halfway through filling it out, it closed itself. Did the site designer mean to do that?

The site is a cool concept, but the execution frustrated me. I hope he gets it working better. I found what I believe is the designer's email address on a site he linked to, and emailed him about it.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Friday, June 28, 2002 (Link)

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