This week I’m at the “Towards a social science of web 2.0” conference in York along with Jane Secker from CLT and Gwyneth Price from the Institute of Education. This generally seems to be a very multidisciplinary conference with people from social science, library and learning technology backgrounds; although I would say there are probably more from a social science and academic background. There were two keynote speakers to open the conference, the first of these was Bernie Hogan (University of Toronto) talking about how he has developed ways of analysing social networks and how these relationships form different distributions and clusters. Second up was Scott Lash from Goldsmiths who was arguing for a new ‘new media’ ontology. I’ll be back to provide a summary later, maybe.

In the first of the parallel sessions I attended a paper looking at the spatial distribution of social networks by extracting location information from MySpace. The author (Tobias Escher, Oxford) then went on to clean and categorise this information and mash that up with with Google maps. This looks like a fascinating area of research which I hope to look more into later. Unfortunately I couldn’t stay to the end of this session as Jane and Gwyneth were presenting the LASSIE talk in another room.

Fortunately someone far more methodical than myself was blogging from Jane and Gwyneth’s session providing a summary of the LASSIE paper as well as the two other papers in the same session.

More to follow…

Update: Jane has also been blogging from the conference and here’s a further posting from me on the Andrew Keen and Charles Leadbetter evening session.