December 16, 2008

I seem to have landed in the middle of some exciting, new (to me) theories around online news and network theory.

Last week while in Montreal I met Claude G. Théoret who is part of Exvisu which offers “Strategic Network Intelligence”. What is that? They make maps of conversations occurring on the web, noting the number of links between blogs and reoccurring terms. That’s what I understand at this preliminary phase. They are offering their services to companies and politicians who want to know what the hot button issues among the people they need to please, as well why kind of language is being used to talk about issues. The outcome of this research aims to be similar to what pollsters claim to do. I imagine using both techniques together will produce the most fruitful results.

Claude lent me his copy of Linked by Albert-László Barabási – a well written explanation of how network theory developed and how it is being used by the ‘new cartographers’.

And today I came upon a Dutch site – Issuenetwork.org – that offers tools and information about issue networking on the web. I was particularly interested in this 2004 paper on the way news devlivery will be (is being) transformed by the evolution of network technology and particularly this section “six arguments against news“, a provocative sub heading in my circles, but is meant to cricise mainstream news delivery techniques.

Another article on the same site, The News about Networks 2: Making Issues into Rights - introduces a 2004 workshop where the aim is to get media activists using the Issue Crawler tools  (which in their aims seem similar to the tools used by Exvisu) being developed at the de Balie Center for Culture and Politics, Amsterdam.

Much of the workshop will revolve around using the Issue Crawler, server-side software, developed with OneWorld International (London), Aguidel (Paris) and Recognos (Cluj-Napoca) that locates, analyses and visualises networks on the Web. We also will make use of novel techniques to monitor and analyse the news through Google News and RSS readers. Textual, semantic and other data analyses may be undertaken.

They questions the were asking at the conference were:

• What are my networks? What is my relative standing within these networks?
• Which types of organisations, agendas and terms dominate these networks?
• Do the organisations in these networks recognise each other’s work and issues?
• Which parts of the networks hold together if one takes out funders? Do they hold together if one takes out other agenda-setters, be it (big) media or intergovernmental organisations?