Social Networking Results for #scio11 Hash Tag on Twitter
(Click to Enlarge)

The above image is just one graph of the many tweets related to the Science Online 2011 Unconference. I generated the above graph using the open-source free software NodeXL, a Microsoft Excel plugin that harvests social networking data from common online sources and provides a variety of mean for analyzing it. In the following post, I’ll provide a brief overview of social network mapping with NodeXL using data harvested from Facebook and Science Online 2011 tweets and provide directions for making your own social network maps, where you can explore and manipulate the data to find your own insights.

The Memetic Ecosystem Within Mxplx

I’m a big reader, and a lot of what I read inspires the posts for ideonexus. I love it when I find a brilliant insight in a text and can slap it down as a blockquote or relate it to other citations I’ve come across in the past. I’m tickled by brilliant ideas, and I love the communal exercise of building on old ideas and mashups from them.

A frustration I’ve experienced often over the years is remembering a brilliant insight from Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, or some other author that would make an excellent complement for my current blog post, but having no idea which book in which it appeared. Even if I know the book, it can take an hour of thumbing through the pages to locate the passage I need (often because the text isn’t worded the way I remember it). And what about all those brilliant passages I’ve long forgotten?

These are the reasons I’ve written mxplx, an online tool to aide in the practice of active reading, research, and citation management.