We’ve had yet another interesting and eye-opening week of posts on network structure and dynamics. One prevalent theme was that of cascades through a network. In one example, gblogger explained the link between cascades and political primaries, specifically the currently ongoing Democratic race for the Presidential nomination. The author explained how certain […]

By an overwhelming margin, this past week’s posts have been about the potential irrationality of information cascades.  Moviegoers, home shoppers, hush puppies, flash mobs, stamp collectors, and wall street (see a great post by ehp1459, and a post about the Indian capital markets by randomvoice) all have a bit of blind-following-the-blind in them.  Posters were […]

This week, many postings covered the recent class topics of information cascades and web search/keyword-based advertising. In fact, one could almost say that the class blog experienced an information cascade, as specific examples within each topic were repeated and “hot” this week.
Some of the popular subjects…
1. Search engines and the use of link analysis: We […]

This past week we saw a number of interesting applications of network theory on graphs ranging from social to business to information networks. Two especially insightful posts discussed voter networks in the United States and the importance of social networks in the music industry. In his article on voter networks, pastafarian1859 examined the […]

Several posts this week about game theory as applied to various circumstances. There were some very creative applications, ranging from loolooloocy’s analysis of the dating games in TV show HOUSE, to several political issues: the Israel and Hezbollah conflict, democratization in Russia, presidential elections, and the Cold War.
Many of these posts give examples of […]

There are several interesting topics covered in recent posts on the course blog. For starters, it’s looking like we can find examples pretty much everywhere of networks that behave according to the rules we learn in class. Students have found examples in everything from investing within one’s network in the financial industry to Republican party […]

In the past week there have been several additional interesting posts to the class blog. At this point the number of new posts is small enough that we can briefly comment on each of them. There were two posts on game theory. amcoops245 discussed the need to use mixed strategies in playing poker. Poker […]

As a way to summarize some of the activity on the Networks class blog, the course staff will be posting to a “digest blog” that will run in parallel with the main class blog. Once the blog schedule gets up to full speed next week, there will be more content than we can possibly hope […]

Several recent posts discuss the impact of network effects. sithswine182 discusses how Zune, Microsoft’s new mp3 player, relies on network effects and why its strategy has not been successful. timo writes about Dell’s endorsement of Ubuntu Linux and what kind of implications this might have for future operating systems that wish to leverage network effects.
rorschachex […]

A number of posts this past week discussed various positive and negative aspects of information cascades. On one hand, companies can use social networks to generate additional social valueforf their products (e.g., FireFox, Nintendo, MySpace). If successful, such strategies can also serve as an efficient advertisement tool.
As mentioned in class, efforts in computer […]