Ross Mayfield marks up the social network analysis (SNA) Strategy + Business article. Ross compares the short evolution of SNA's models with that of longer and more widely attended financial models. It is relatively early for SNA but not new.

Social network analysis isn't exactly new. Just look at epidemiology and heraldry, discipline for centuries. What is dramatically new is the digital network.

The net makes SNA cheap. Health and social scientists analyzed social networks for decades. Their process, using phone and face-to-face interviews, paper forms, call-backs, and methods to avoid system gaming, was slow and cumbersome. The costs were so high and the human intrusion so deep that projects were done selectively and with limited scope. Social maps were out of date before they were finished. Still are for the most part. You might do a few dozen projects in a full career.

Online networks change all this. With tools like Valdis Kreb's InFlow, digital networks:

• Speed things up. Projects can be executed in a day, updated in near real time.
• Scale large. Big networks, with hundreds of thousands of people, can be mapped.
• Itirate. Time lapse studies show a network's dynamics. Now longitudinal trends and changes can be revealed.
• Ingratiate SNA. SNA tools become polite, less intrusive by using existing digital artifacts and debris.

More, better, faster.

The other change is qualitative. Let me invoke the Black Scholes options pricing model to explain.

One of the great simplifications of securities analysis is that of the efficient market, a market where prices reflect all information. This is useful because money is the ultimate fungible item: everything can be expressed as money and transactions don't take place unless both parties believe they are getting a fair exchange. Money and markets reduce commerce to math.

And then you complicate things; there is a real world to accomodate. Not everyone gets the same information, information is dispersed unevenly, markets interact with each other, and the list goes on. Modelers refine their explanations of how markets work, the better to plan markets and exploit their weaknesses.

SNA, on the other hand, can look at the full range of human behavior, thought, expression, and interaction. Happily, humanity is not entirely expressible in one dimension. SNA on the net offers the hope of diving deeply into the rich colors and textures of human relationships.

So the net amplfies SNA both quantitatively and qualtitatively.

The world of microcontent has a role in this.

The web's technical structures (links, web pages, addresses, etc.) are the skeleton of the new SNA. Microcontent's new metadata, substructures (the elements that make up a CV or a blogroll, for example), and contexts are SNA's flesh and blood. Microcontent will help us find clusters of people with similar skills, clusters who attended the same Sheryl Crow concert, who are alumni of the same firm. Annotation of time and space, topic labels, and taxonomy markings add relevance and enable new applications.

Blogging is one of the first sustained microcontent movements. Weblogs concentrate the content and behavior of a person. My blog is of, by, and about me. I link and write, therefore I blog. Add a thousand thousand fellow bloggers and the blogosphere becomes a fertile space for mapping social interactions and relationships.

That's why I want blogging and metablogging tools to embrace microcontent metadata and substructures; the better to support new contexts.

[a klog apart klogs]