Below are two things that make me think about our earlier class discussions regarding “community in blogs.” My friends list can be seen by clicking here, and scrolling down.
This is the Six Degrees of Separation program I mentioned in class:
This is the intent of the program: This is a Six Degrees of Separation tool. What happens when you put two names in the boxes below is that the system starts downloading your friends lists from LiveJournal. It then figures out which LiveJournal users can be used to make a chain between those names, starting with the person on the left and ending with the person on the right.
The first thing I did (outside the Six Degrees of Separation program) was a LiveJournal Search > Random, to find me a random LiveJournal userid. It returned the userid, xmusouka, who is one Jason D. in Springfield, Massachusetts, whom, of course, I don’t know. I then put my userid, dailyafirmation, in the left box and his userid in the right box, and pressed, “find link!” In case you can’t do this yourself if you’re not a LiveJournal member, I have clipped the results of the run below the form.
dailyafirmation -> brianrdu -> farventure -> dukeshedevil -> xmusouka (4 hops)
So xmusouka is a “friend” of dukeshedevil who is a friend of farventure who is a friend of my friend, brianrdu. It continues to amaze me how these totally random folks can be within Six Degrees of Separation of me, especially with the size of the LiveJournal “community,” if you will.
I’m not quite sure the criteria used in this “Cliques” program. My guess is that it is based on the number of times (I’m guessing there must be a minimum number to make the list) the folks in the “clique” comment on each other’s journals. Though other considerations, I guess, could be part of the criteria, such as the number of times they read (or access) each other’s journals. It’s also possible that members of the clique must also have each other listed as friends.
I am a member of 2 cliques of size 4: