Posts Tagged ‘social ’
The buzz around Q&A startup Quora has been building steadily over the past couple of months. I measure this not only by the number of Follow messages received concerning people randomly sampled from my Facebook connections which are now flooding my inbox, but also by the heated debate that is developing about the site’s usefulness, much of which is chronicled in this TechCrunch article about the “Quora Backlash Backlash”.
I’ve been interested for a while now in how information and behavior can spread through social networks; an important sub-topic in this field is the spread of health behaviors. This area of study is especially important in understanding the behaviors of adolescents, as there are a number of unhealthy behaviors (ranging from drug use to unhealthy eating to unsafe sex practices) which start in adolescence, persist into adulthood, and contribute to some of the leading causes of death and disability.
As any parent or educator will likely tell you, the behavior of teens closely linked in a social network will often display many similarities: teens who smoke or drink, for instance, are often friends with other teens who smoke or drink. By establishing and tracking the spread of these behaviors scientifically, we can gain a greater understanding of the mechanisms at work and perhaps harness them to help spread healthy behaviors instead of unhealthy ones.
Earlier this week, the team at Aardvark unveiled a new paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine” which will be presented in April at WWW 2010. Inspired by and patterned after “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, which describes the PageRank algorithm which drives Google’s search ranking system (which as Aardvark’s blog points out, was also presented at WWW 12 years ago). The paper, by Aardvark’s Damon Horowitz and Stanford’s Sep Kamvar, focuses mostly on the architecture of the Aardvark system, from the external representations with which users interact to the internal ranking algorithms on which the system runs. Below, I present a short summary of what they report, focusing on the elements I found most interesting.
