The all-time champion Expert Voices blog is about to retire. Cornell Info 204 - Networks has attracted 531 posts and 289 comments since it was activated in late January. And it isn’t about “American Idol,” either. It is a supplement to a college course on how the social, technological, and natural worlds are connected, and how the study of networks sheds light on these connections. It helped that professors Jon Kleinberg and David Easley required students to post to the blog, and that the posts were graded. Thusly motivated, the students did a thorough scouring and discussion of the web’s resources on the academic study of networks, and served it all up to you for free.

High school dating network, 1993-95

The illustration above shows the structure of romantic and sexual relationships at a high school in a mid-sized Midwestern city in 1993-95. It was created by Physicist Mark Newman from data published in 2004 by Peter Bearman, James Moody, and Katherine Stovel. It shows that most of the students involved in relationships are linked to each other through their partners — a worst-case scenario for the transmission of sexual diseases. Other subjects covered in the class included the spread of opinions, fads, and movements through society; food webs and financial markets; marketing through social networks; and the politics of online communities.

“David Easley and I thought that having the blog as part of our Networks class was a great experience,” said Kleinberg.  “The posts were creative, insightful, and timely; we were really impressed by the engaging writing the students were able to bring to this task, and we learned a lot from our daily reading of the blog.  In a class like this, where the course themes relate so broadly to current events and new technological developments, the blog was a great way to enlist the expertise of 200 students in finding relevant articles, news stories, and Web sites that illustrate the pervasiveness of networks.”

The volume of information on this blog created an indexing problem. The professors and teaching assistants addressed this by creating a digest blog that summarizes and comments on posts made in the last few days. If you switch back and forth between the digest blog and the full-length version, the effect is like listening in on some of the class discussions — but you don’t have to travel or pay tuition.