

Best Connected Individuals Are Not the Most Influential in Social Networks - waterlesscloud
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24748/?a=f

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yungchin
For everyone like me who didn't understand the difference between an
individual in a high k-shell and a hub: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-core>
clarifies it nicely. (it didn't help for searching that core and shell got
interchanged :))

That is, you can be a hub in a low k-shell, if say, you live in a town where
everyone knows everyone but only the mailman ever leaves town.

Edit: in other words, this says that it's not about how many people you know,
but how many highly-connected people you know. That's exactly what is usually
informally meant by "well-connected".

~~~
davi
See also this HN submission for the original article:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097567>

Figure 1d in the linked-to paper illustrates the difference between high
k-shell and high k nicely.

To quote from the paper (where k = # of edges a node has): "We start by
removing all nodes with degree k = 1. After removing all the nodes with k = 1,
some nodes may be left with one link, so we continue pruning the system
iteratively until there is no node left with k = 1 in the network. The removed
nodes, along with the corresponding links, form a k-shell with index kS = 1.
In a similar fashion, we iteratively remove the next k-shell, kS = 2, and
continue removing higher k-shells until all nodes are removed. As a result,
each node is associated with a unique kS index, and the network can be viewed
as the union of all k-shells."

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jyothi
Facebook and other large online networks should make an app with such
interesting profile & network analysis data. Since it is available only to
individuals they won't be letting too much out anyway they are still the gold
mine of the data.

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tybris
> It's easy to imagine that because the links that form between various
> individuals in a society are not governed by any overarching rules, they
> must have a random structure.

I don't find that easy to imagine at all. Social systems are full of rules.

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pwoeifj
how does this k-shell metric compare to, for example, pagerank?

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est
Best connected in social networks: Anonymous

