del.icio.us tagometer and board interlocks

It's spring break at BU. While my students are away, I am doing a bit of housekeeping and finishing my online introduction to network mathematics.

For housekeeping, I have upgraded Connectedness to the new Blogger platform, and I just added a new feature to the sidebar--the del.icio.us Tag-o-Meter. There you can see the tags used most often to describe this blog, according to users of del.icio.us (one of the most popular social bookmarking services). By clicking on any one of the tags, it's easy to explore the most popular tangents to our own eclectic posts. For example: socialnetworks, collaboration, business, and community. The Tag-o-Meter is a great example of dynamically generated content; it summarizes Connectedness reader feedback with no mediation on my part. Something like the Referrer Feed (farther down in the sidebar).

Mathematically speaking, del.icio.us tags are just like corporate boardrooms. Both are examples of bipartite networks, which link two distinct types of nodes (red and blue in the example at right) that otherwise do not connect to each other. For example, tags relate to other tags only indirectly through their shared links to website URLs. Similarly, boards link to their members and through those links develop interlocks with other boards. See They Run Richmond and TheyRule.net for great stories emerging from bipartite networks.

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