I’ve been talking about article social networks for a while, and last August I wrote ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder‘ which contained the image below.

I’ve continued to be fascinated by them and below are two more images – focused on defined areas of the above graph

These are beautiful – but is there more to it?

Both images show definite structure.  So, our users, simply by using the site are adding structure and energy.  I keep getting drawn to the principle of entropy.  I’m absolutely sure that our users are ordering the articles in Trip but does that have any value?

I admit to being relatively clueless – part of the purpose of the post is to see if the wisdom of the Trip users can be brought to bear to try and help me figure out what the above might mean and what might the next steps be!

The above image (taken from Article social networks, meaning and redundancy) shows distinct clusters as well.  In the bottom left is a cluster of articles on UTI and cranberry and it consists of 19 articles.  If you do a search of Trip you find many more than this.  So, our users are not clicking on many articles – so as well as adding structure are they giving us clues as to articles that aren’t worthwhile (based on their collective judgements)?

If you click on one article in that cluster, is it likely that the others will be worthwhile?  What about if a new article is published and joins the cluster based on another person searching and effectively adding the article to the cluster – is that useful?  I’m sure there are no absolutes, but these appear to be hints – surely?

A final thought – the graphs are based on all users.  I imagine the above graph would look different if the user had been a general/family practitioner compared with, say, a urologist.  Stronger clues?

I would be absolutely delighted if anyone can help me figure out the value/meaning of the data.  And, if you can think of ways of working together I’d be delighted to see how we can share the data!