Below is a curated list of articles from this week of innovative social analytics and business intelligence initiatives.

In this article from O’Reilly Radar, we learn that social network analysis is amalgamation of social science analysis such as sociology, political science, psychology, and anthropology combined with traditional mathematical measurements. At it’s core, social network analysis measures relationships between people and organizations. But cutting edge research is also looking at ways to leverage social network analysis as a form of early warning system for natural disasters. Much social network analysis has been regressive in nature, the future will focus more on real time analysis.

And speaking of real time analytics, the article from the Washington Post makes the argument that real time results may have a significant influence on the up-coming 2012 elections.

Perry is done,” came a Twitter posting from a viewer called (at)PatMcPsu, even while the Texas governor struggled to name the third of three federal agencies he said he would eliminate as president. Another, called (at)sfiorini, messaged, “Whoa? Seriously, Rick Perry? He can’t even name the agencies he wants to abolish. Wow. Just wow.

The key point to remember is that the “real time citizen” is no longer content to remain passive. Additionally, will the “real time citizen” quietly wait for poll stations and voting counts to close in other states before announcing the results of his/her own state? Will be interesting to watch how quiet or loud Mr. and Mrs. Real Time Citizen will react in 2012.

Finally, social app analytics start-up Kontagent snagged $12 million in a Series B round. According to an interview with Kontagent’s founder, what makes Kontagent unique is that does not perform “traditional” social analytics function (such as conversation monitoring, tabulating likes, etc) but performs deep analytics, with a focus on teasing out profitability KPIs, and has a team of data analytics and data visualization scientists working to help clients understand, interpret, and make informed business decisions based on Kontagent’s proprietary data visualization techniques.

In Towards Design Guidelines for Portable Digital Proximities A Case study with Social Net and Social Proximity (.pdf), the authors apparently introduced the concept of social proximity, which they define as:

[T]he relationships between people in space, within social networks, and through time.

In Life in the network: the coming age of computational social science, the authors discuss the rapidly changing pace of computational social science.

In To join or not to join: the illusion of privacy in social networks with mixed public and private user profiles (.pdf) the authors discuss privacy issues related to social media and the natural tension between “public” and “private” information (see also my earlier article relating to this topic).

In Inferring friendship network structure by using mobile phone data, the authors found that it’s possible to infer with 95% accuracy friendships based on mobile data.

In Bridging the Gap Between Physical Location and Online Social Networks (.pdf), the authors demonstrate how to predict friendship between two users using their respective location trails.

In Social distance, heterogeneity, and social interactions (.pdf, and I hope you’re good in mathematics to understand this article), the authors propose a new model to analyze peer group interactions.

In Connectivity Does Not Ensure Community: On Social Capital, Networks and Communities of Place (.pdf), the author proposes that the strongest online communities are those create senses of social ownership within the community.

In Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems (.pdf) the authors discuss how collaborative tagging systems can be used to derive a global tagging relatedness structure from an uncontrolled tagging folksonomy.

In The anatomy of a large-scale social search engine (.pdf) the authors present Aardvark, a social search engine.

The first article discusses how the Web collective–the user commons if you will–is benefiting from individual efforts at curating content, done largely as a free service driven by a spirit to share.

Sharing has become a reflex action when people find an interesting video, link or story. Great content going viral isn’t new. But the sharing mentality is no longer confined to the occasional gems. It’s for everything we consume online, large or small.

I think anyone engaged in the social Web would readily agree with this sentiment. It’s what makes participating in this distributed forum so fun. The article also points out, however, that the vast content mines that exist can be somewhat difficult to navigate to find true gems. Thus, the implication is that content providers need to step up to the plate and deliver content systems that make it easier on Web “content curators”.

The research paper referenced above describes how the BBC used a concept called Named Entity Recognition (NER) to extract concepts from textual input. This allowed for more efficient human editorial input to ensure that these concepts were accurate. Once approved these “concepts” were transformed into links appearing on a Web page. This process then allowed the BBC to use the “concept links” to create user journeys through their site. All this is based on semantic web principles. The future looks bright, indeed, for those of us who constantly scour the Web for salient content.

Information Week covered text analytics, describing how JetBlue uses text analytics to understand customer sentiment from email messages, which informed the airline how to draft its customer bill of rights. And KMWorld discusses how the burgeoning field of “customer experience analysis” uses text analytics to increase customer engagement and loyalty.

Customers today aren’t just customers–they’re influencers and social networkers. Across the Web at any hour, they’re sharing observations about your company’s products and services, and those of your competitors…These new modes of customer behavior make it essential for companies to move beyond traditional ways of gathering, analyzing, and acting on customer information - Information Week

For a long time, text analytics was a technology in search of a business need. Now, thanks to social media, the need is there; the question is whether the technology can ramp up fast enough to be commercial – KMWorld

Where social media in real estate sometimes has the floor manners of a dog’s breakfast, it’ll become increasingly important for real estate firms to engage in text-sentiment analysis as part of their overall CRM and customer experience efforts. Here’s a list of companies that offer text-sentiment analysis services:

• Ata Plana
• Jodange
• Radian6
• Attensity
• Clarabridge

Photo credit: mnapoleon

• It’s still unresolved whether vertical search will significantly impact general search
• The nexus between real-time search, consumer intent, and semantic search is where the search gold resides
• Hurricane Katrina taught Google a lesson about relevance and real time results
• Opportunities to compete with Google and Bing exist, but only on the edge or fringe such as applications that bypass search engines, employ automated content discovery mechanisms, use semantic search, or perfect mobile geo-search

Interesting quotes:

Google is like smoking cigarettes, it’s a habit that’s going to be difficult to give up. So what can you do? You have to think about the problem space. Google’s approach is to get people in and out of search engine quickly with their result. Not the right way to think about it. Right way to think about it is to think about minimizing time of completing a task, not minimize the amount of time to match a query with a url.

[O]rganize the information in a way that synthesizes the task that you want to accomplish.

Mobile is huge. Apple is the big fish at the moment. Android coming on strong. Won’t hold my breath on Microsoft.

Two things which potentially threaten us. [1] As we become bigger and older, it could become more difficult for Google to innovate…[2] Also worry about diminishment of sense of entrepreneurship.