Network Centrality: All Your Links Are Belong to Us

Yesterday was a full moon. Tomorrow is the longest day of the year. What better day to celebrate the brightest metric known to network science: centrality.

Connectedness celebrates centrality by putting Google, the world's most popular centrality-based tool, to work. For any set of keywords you can imagine, Google points you to the center of that universe. Each link below does exactly that, using the highlighted text as the keywords. Results are real-time and may change after this post goes to press.

• Network Centrality: The center of this universe is Steve Borgatti. Yeah!
• Organizational Network: The center of this universe is Valdis Krebs. Kudos to you, Valdis. I am jealous.
• Community Network: Apparently centered in Seattle. Interesting. How did Seattle beat out Portland, OR?
• Collaboration, Innovation: Centered on Dave Pollard. This confirms my excellent impression of him from a couple months ago--which was the first I heard of him.
• Leadership, and most other words you care to look up: Wikipedia has the first answer you will find.

No celebration of centrality would be complete without asking, "What universe am I the center of?" For Connectedness, the answer is: sears refrigerator customer service repairman. To all my readers, let me say: Welcome to the inner sanctum.

While you're celebrating having "arrived," let me add that this weekend is the fourth birthday of Connectedness. All the more reason for jubilation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.