So Where Am I Socially Situated on Google+?

I haven’t really entered into the spirit of Google Plus yet – I haven’t created any circles or started populating them, for example, and I post rarely – but if you look at my public profile page you’ll see a list of folk who have added me to their circles…

This is always a risky thing of course – because my personal research ethic means that for anyone who pops their head above the horizon in my social space by linking publicly to one of my public profiles, their public data is fair game for an experiment… (I’m also aware that via authenticated access I may well be able to find grab even more data – but again, my personal research ethic is such that I try to make sure I don’t use data that requires any form of authentication in order to acquire it.)

So, here’s a started for 10: a quick social positioning map generated around who folk who have added me to public circles on Google+ publicly follow… Note that for folk who follow more than 90 people, I’m selecting a random sample of 90 of their friends to plot the graph. The graph is further filtered to only show folk who are followed by 5 or more of the folk who have added me to their circles (bear in mind that this may miss people out because of the 90 sample size hack).

Through familiarity with many of the names, I spot what I’d loosely label as an OU grouping, a JISC grouping, an ed-techie grouping and a misc/other grouping…

Given one of the major rules of communication is ‘know your audience’, I keep wondering why so many folk who “do” the social media thing have apparently no interest in who they’re bleating at or what those folk might be interested in… I guess it’s a belief in “if I shout, folk will listen…”?

PS if you want to grab your own graph and see how you’re socially positioned on Google Plus, the code is here (that script is broken… I’ve started an alternative version here). It’s a Python script that requires the networkx library. (The d3 library is also included but not used – so feel free to delete that import…)