After years of writings on the potential of using the Internet to improve democratic governance, one must think that citizens have numerous offerings to choose from. Lately governments have introduced numerous policy papers and declarations that put a priority on... Alexander Schellong http://www.citizen-relationship-management.de

Twitter is a gigantic repository for our collective state of mind. Every second, thousands of tweets reveal what everybody and their mother had for lunch, what Justin Bieber is up to, or what magnificent link you should be checking out... Sune Lehmann http://sunelehmann.com/

Four years ago, Frederick Bieber, Charles Brenner and I wrote a paper in Science on the feasibility of "familial searching" of offender DNA databases for leads. Familial searching utilizes the known statistical correlations in the genetic profiles of close relatives... David Lazer

We are pleased to announce the first ever CONNECTING THE DOTS symposium on network visualization, at Harvard University on Friday, October 22, 2010. The symposium will feature two exciting keynote speakers: Alessandro Vespignani, Professor of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University,... JP Onnela

Just recently, I came across the following video showing LinkedIn chief scientist DJ Patil explaining the egocentric networks (networks consisting of an individual and their immediate friends) for a few individuals based on their LinkedIn connections. Although the individuals in... Sune Lehmann http://sunelehmann.com/

Below is an animation of the spread of MFN treaties in the 1860s. But let me provide a little background before you play it... One of the major themes that runs through the study of international relations is that of... David Lazer

In a well written blog post, over on O'Reilly Radar, entitled What is Data Science, Mike Loukides does an excellent job of defining the content of 'Data Science', by discussing the "the technologies, the companies and the unique skill sets"... Sune Lehmann http://sunelehmann.com/

Is this ridiculous, or what? from (where else) 5/13/2010 New York Times ....... Stan Wasserman

This conference might be of interest to some readers of this blog. Call for Papers: CompSust 2010 2nd International Conference on Computational Sustainability Location: Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, USA Date: June, 28th-30th, 2010 Website: http://www.computational-sustainability.org/compsust10/ Overview: CompSust10... David Lazer

Guestpost by former PNG fellow Thomas Langenberg and Jana Thiel who recently founded Halalati, a social media start-up for do-it-yourself social media marketing tools, with others. Today, anybody can get Twitter followers. Even without a strategy. But what happens when... Alexander Schellong http://www.citizen-relationship-management.de

A quick reminder that April 30th is the final chance to submit an abstract to the High Throughput Humanities Workshop that I'm organizing along with Riley Crane , Gourab Ghoshal, and Max Schich, at this years European Conference on Complex... Sune Lehmann http://sunelehmann.com/

My colleague and collaborator, Laszlo Barabasi, has a book that is about to come out, Bursts. A good read, by the way, but I am writing this entry to point to a fun game created for the book. Basically, this... David Lazer

The Whitehouse's Open Government team has posted the Open Government plans of all federal agencies and departments with a pre-evaluation scheme on their website and calls academics to adopt one of the plans, review it and submit evaluations. The goal... Ines Mergel http://inesmergel.wordpress.com