Tobias Escher at the OII

Last Wednesday I had the pleasure to take part in the Social Sciences dinner of the Keble College Social Sciences Group. Over good food and wine, Professor Robin Dunbar (now at Oxford) gave an enjoyable talk about the number that made him famous: 150. The so-called Dunbar’s number was prominently featured in the book The [...]

Today we had a talk by Jason Stockwood who is Managing Director of Match.com UK which is an online dating site. Jason shared some interesting numbers: 20% leave their service because they found “someone significant”, average time spent is 6 months before dropping out (about 50% of them come back though), the core is 28 [...]

Just listening to the wrap up of this really interesting two-day conference that has been taken place in York in the last two days. I have been giving a presentation here about the Geography of (Online) Social Networks which is analysing friendship networks on social network sites such as MySpace in respect to where the [...]

In a recent post about the legality of rating sites such as RateMyTeachers and PatientOpinion I concluded: “Last but not least, the subject under public scrutiny does matter as professors might well be made to face personal criticism in their role as public figures while teachers and nurses might have to be treated differently.” Well, [...]

Whatever name you prefer for the current state of the Internet (user generated content, Web 2.0, the social web etc.), it clearly seems like a good time for consumers of goods, even of those we still rather reluctantly consider as such like healthcare or education. The opinion of the general public is in high demand [...]

More than 45 years ago James S. Coleman conducted a study of “The Social Life of the Teenager and its Impact on Education”, published in a much cited book called “The Adolescent Society”. In this study he was examining social status among kids in ten different schools, including a structural analysis of young people’s social [...]

Danah Boyd mentions an interesting idea in order to help youngsters who are in trouble (in whatever way): A kind of digital street outreach, very much in the same way like we have outreach teams on the street today that look for kids that might need help. Why this sounds like a great idea, I [...]

I guess it had to happen at some point: I’m on facebook now. The main reasons for my resistance so far have been that I do actually like to have a tiny bit of privacy left – something that I see violated once random pictures link to you and more private information. Anyway, officially I [...]

When I was looking at it first I had some trouble to understand what Robert Putnam actually understands by social capital. Sure, there is his much quoted definition: “…features of social life – networks, norms, and trust – that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives… Social capital, in short, refers [...]

Mainly unnoticed from the rest of the world, a German social networking site called StudiVZ (translates to something like student directory) is now the main pasttime for German University students. It is said to have more than 1 million registered users and judging by my observations of what German students use their computers for in [...]