Social dynamics in cyberspace

Summary form only given. The social dynamics of individuals connected through the Internet is relevant to issues of productivity, viral marketing and the sorting out of useful ideas from the general chatter of a community. This talk will first describe a mechanism for automatically identifying communities of practice from email traffic within organizations as well as patterns in document access. Equally important is how information spreads within communities. This information has recently acquired a new dimension through the phenomenon of collaborative tagging, whereby many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content such as bookmarks, photographs and blogs. There are interesting patterns that emerge within these "folksonomies" specifically; we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. A dynamical model of collaborative tagging predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.