http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23302
Recently, a court has approved Square Enix—one of Japan’s largest video game publishers, famous for its Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy series—to take over U.K.-based publisher Eidos, famous for its Tomb Raider and Hitman series. While video game companies have been merging pretty commonly in the past few years—such as the mergers […]

If you have not yet seen a clip of Susan Boyle’s performance last week on “Britain’s Got Talent”, you can help contribute to this network phenomenon by checking out the Youtube video.

Susan Boyle, a forty-seven year old Scottish village dweller, exploded to worldwide fame last week when an online video of her “Britain’s Got […]

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/people/hal/NYTimes/2006-02-09.html
The diffusion of innovation in a social network has many facets that need to be taken into account.  Introduction of such new technology doesn’t always work. Its “relative advantage” compared to practices already in place by a society is a good indicator of how well an innovation will take hold. Also, how complex or observable […]

Links
BBC News - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/more_or_less/5176698.stm
Judith Kleinfeld’s website - http://www.judithkleinfeld.com/
After hearing about the small-world phenomenon and six degrees of separation, it seemed appropriate to search for recent attempts to duplicate Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment from 1967. Some experiments mentioned in lecture today, such as the e-mail experiment by Dodds, Muhammed, and Watts, came up multiple times in […]

“I’m a Mac.” “And I’m a PC,” the actors in a popular Apple ad proclaim. When the actor proclaims that he is a PC, there is no doubt in the viewer’s mind as to what operating system, or OS, he runs. However, Windows was not always inextricably tied to the PC as it is now.
In […]

Twitter, seemingly overnight, has become immensely popular, and like the marketing via search engines that we learned about in class, marketing via twitter has begun. Just like companies learned that search engines are a great way to be able to target your ads to specific consumers who are mostly likely to be interested in your […]

In 2008, Microsoft Research conducted a study using instant messages that allegedly proves the six degrees of separation experiment described in class. The six degrees of separation experiment suggested that every person on the plant was connected to every other person on the planet by just 6 people. In the original experiment, letters […]

In class we explored how analyzing a network’s structure reveals information about the individuals participating in the network: their importance in a cluster, their relationships amongst neighbors, etc. How can this information be leveraged in real world applications? One purported use is to gather and project downloading habits of users in P2P networks like BitTorrent. […]

In September of 2005, players in Blizzard’s incredibly popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft, started dropping dead from a new disease accidentally introduced by Blizzard in an update to the game. The problem started when Blizzard’s programmers added a new instance, which is a separate dungeon disconnected from the outside world that players can enter to […]

When considering networks, it might appear as though cell phones would drastically increase the size of one’s network. The ability to contact people in almost any situation, from nearly any situation seemingly would increase the amount of weak ties one could have; these ties being weak because of distance potential and uncertainty […]