2 From First Monday

Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope – “Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.”

A Grateful Dead analysis: The relationship between concert and listening behavior – “This article presents a framework to compare online patterns of music usage aggregated from dedicated online music services to offline patterns of music performance collected from live concert set lists. This framework is employed to explore the relationship between band live concert and individual fan listening behavior of the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead was an American band born out of the 1960s San Francisco, California psychedelic movement, that played music together from 1965 to 1995. Despite relatively little popular radio airtime, while on tour the Grateful Dead enjoyed a cult–like following from a fan base that numbered in the millions. Still today, some ten years after dissolution, the band remains popular according to online music services, such as last.fm. This article presents a comparative analysis between 1,590 of the Grateful Dead’s live concert set lists from 1972 to 1995 and 2,616,990 Grateful Dead listening events by last.fm users from August 2005 to October 2007. While there is a strong correlation between how songs were played in concert and how they were listened to by last.fm members, the outlying songs in this trend identify interesting aspects of the band and their present–day fans.”

Ok, maybe my priorities are changing, because the second article is much more interesting (to me), than the first one.