In the last few days on the class blog:

cosmohr writes about the FCC spectrum auction, and discusses how it illustrates a number of principles we’ve discussed in lecture, as well as many further complexities that can arise. It’s interesting that the spectrum auction puts in an appearance at the end of Sylvia Nasar’s much acclaimed book about John Nash, A Beautiful Mind — though as far as I recall, the spectrum auction didn’t make it into the movie …

mistert describes research on a network model of the relationships among firms. Here, the edges of the network are annotated with labels that indicate the nature of the relationship — for example, whether they are in competition or cooperation. The post notes the connection to the kinds of annotations we discussed in the context of structural balance, as well as the fact that relationships among firms can be much more complex than just allliance or antagonism.

Scribner discusses TouchGraph, which allows a user to visualize related search results in network form. Automatically help people visualize spaces like this is remains an interesting research problem, both for search and other kinds of data analysis.

rzrsk8 writes about recent developments in which social networking sites such as Facebook have begun making it more feasible for individuals to create applications on top of their systems, potentially enriching these environments through third-party contributions.