you sent me six mails in September, six in October and by November 6th I haver already received three. I did not want to check the all opt out box because I’m interested to be informed about you, but I do not accept to be spammed monthly, so I just checked the damn box.

You used to be nicer, but lately Forrester is much nicer: it only sends two emails per month.

Software should be able to apply per user customization properties between common members of users’ groups. These communities should be discovered by the application using existing relationships among the users. The relationship should be an integral part of the application, set by the users (via internal application messaging, internal address book, subscription to mailing lists/interest groups…) or the application administrators (hierarchical definitions, ACLs…). From the set of communities the application should extract  customization properties and recommend the common ones to the rest of the community.

Two documents have been useful:

1. Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope
   is an introductory paper about choosing the right metric for identifying communities in Twitter, but easily applicable to other social networks.  Conclusion for Twitter: Number of followers is not a good metric, @friends are.

2. Discovering Communities in Linear Time: a Physics Approach is a much more interesting paper. It proposes using Kirchhoff’s laws to find communities in linear time (without the need of edge cutting). The algorithm has some drawbacks (Usha Nandini Raghavan, Reka Albert, Soundar Kumara propose an alternative), but the approach is interesting because allows to identify communities without identifying hierarchical structures.

For more social network papers, HP Labs has an interesting set of them.

Oh! I also work for an HP company, but I have no relationship to the HP Labs papers.

If you have a WordPress blog, download the new release and follow the usual steps to upgrade.

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Lástima que los verdaderos logros – el amor, la poesía inglesa, el perme de la libertad- deban permenacer en secreto o sean en España un lujo sin porvenir.

From Jaime Gil de Biedma bio, by Miguel Dalmau