Networking, and Small World Syndrome
Aug. 22nd, 2004 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnrA couple of people on my friends list have posted lately on these subjects, partly triggered by a post made by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rho who I know only tangentially. doseybat quoted part of it here, fluffymark drew a wonderful diagram on paper and scanned it in, and emarkienna posted his version (friends only). (I'm sure someone else linked to rho's post too but I can't find it now).
I've started thinking about drawing a similar thing, but in some cases I know people from a newsgroup first, or something similar. I'm thinking vague groups like RPGsoc people, oxnet people, AFP people, ucam.chat people - all those are fairly early groups in the food chain, so to speak, but even there there's a fair bit of overlap. And do I say I know people I met through ucam.chat viadamerell (since it was he who introduced me to the group) or do I have the group as an entity of it's own? And what about the people I think of as vaguely AFP people who I didn't actually meet through AFP myself, but through others. And later groups are so much more complicated, and it gets harder to work out which set of people the link actually came from.
I suspect if I actually make the attempt. I'm going to end up with a strange cross between a directed graph and a Venn diagram, with lots of different colours. It's still the random collisions of two completely different sets that always make the small world syndrome so much fun. I wonder how on earth you could show those? And of course if you knew about them before they happened it wouldn't feel like small world syndrome any more. Perhaps by not getting round to it I'm giving some of you a chance to make the discoveries of connections yourself, rather than giving them all away.
Update: Of course the Mindmap thing is kind of linked, but it shows the closeness of various people to each other, and lets you begin to see vague groups, and I'm more interested in how they evolved and how well they match the groups I mentally file people under, IYSWIM.
rho who I know only tangentially. doseybat quoted part of it here, fluffymark drew a wonderful diagram on paper and scanned it in, and emarkienna posted his version (friends only). (I'm sure someone else linked to rho's post too but I can't find it now).I've started thinking about drawing a similar thing, but in some cases I know people from a newsgroup first, or something similar. I'm thinking vague groups like RPGsoc people, oxnet people, AFP people, ucam.chat people - all those are fairly early groups in the food chain, so to speak, but even there there's a fair bit of overlap. And do I say I know people I met through ucam.chat via
damerell (since it was he who introduced me to the group) or do I have the group as an entity of it's own? And what about the people I think of as vaguely AFP people who I didn't actually meet through AFP myself, but through others. And later groups are so much more complicated, and it gets harder to work out which set of people the link actually came from.I suspect if I actually make the attempt. I'm going to end up with a strange cross between a directed graph and a Venn diagram, with lots of different colours. It's still the random collisions of two completely different sets that always make the small world syndrome so much fun. I wonder how on earth you could show those? And of course if you knew about them before they happened it wouldn't feel like small world syndrome any more. Perhaps by not getting round to it I'm giving some of you a chance to make the discoveries of connections yourself, rather than giving them all away.
Update: Of course the Mindmap thing is kind of linked, but it shows the closeness of various people to each other, and lets you begin to see vague groups, and I'm more interested in how they evolved and how well they match the groups I mentally file people under, IYSWIM.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-08-22 11:04 pm (UTC)AFP and other places
Date: 2004-08-23 09:55 am (UTC)Re: AFP and other places
Date: 2004-08-23 09:57 am (UTC)Re: AFP and other places
Date: 2004-08-23 10:44 am (UTC)And I met Buzzy_Bee and J4 at the same party (in Wimbledon, I think) five years ago, having known them online for a while. Not quite a coincidence, we were all on the same NG's and related stuff, the party was a sort of 'meet'.
I also know another friend of yours, met her and dined out in Dublin a few years ago. If my guess about your connection to Buzzy_Bee and Muttley is correct, you probably met W. through alt.newlyweds or similar.
Which leads me to wonder whether I have actually met you. Would you remember someone who looked a lot like Ned Flanders?
Re: AFP and other places
Date: 2004-08-23 10:47 am (UTC)Re: AFP and other places
Date: 2004-08-23 12:06 pm (UTC)Everyone who meets Tara falls in love with her immediately: she has that effect on people!
We met in June... Angel Meadow? In which case I've been confusing you with Juggzy. The other clue on this page places you in Cambridge, at some or other time: that's like trying to identify a train that went through Birmingham New Street, and they all go there someday.
Re: AFP and other places
Date: 2004-08-23 12:07 pm (UTC)Re: AFP and other places
Date: 2004-08-23 12:15 pm (UTC)As to the comment above that, well, yes, I have been in Cambridge but not when I knew anyone on LJ. But don't forget,
Re: AFP and other places
Date: 2004-08-23 12:35 pm (UTC)Re: AFP and other places
Date: 2004-08-23 12:41 pm (UTC)Re: AFP and other places
Date: 2004-08-25 10:36 pm (UTC)uk.misc and other places
Date: 2004-08-25 10:23 pm (UTC)I was never a True Miscreant (though I often thought I ought to pop in, and at last I have done) but my posts used to leak into there via cross-posted threads in other uk groups and I got to know a few of the personalities that way. I'm not sure if I know you from anywhere else though, and I wasn't around when you took on your new identity so that confused me for a while.
[pause]
Cripes, I've just found your name in a 1989 thread about printer page allocation in the engineering department. Now that is scary. I hope you'll forgive me for not remembering you worked here, if that was indeed you.
Re: uk.misc and other places
Date: 2004-08-25 10:30 pm (UTC)Erm, no. Sorry.
if that was indeed you.
Oh, yes, that'd have been me. I had something of a printer fixation at that point, for reasons that were somewhat involved with trying to program in Prolog...
no subject
Date: 2004-08-23 06:30 pm (UTC)LNR? Her most direct connection to me is through J4, and that's pretty weak as connections go: Jan and I seem to like each other at a distance but we've only met a handful of times. LNR has other indirect links to me, via tangenital acquaintances to Miscreants, and a somewhat at-one-remove web of common contacts on LJ.
There's also a subtext of Chiark people interested in cryptology, whom I know at arms' length through the UK.Crypto mailing list, but I doubt that many of them would recall any name I've ever used without some serious archive searching.
Puzzled. Mail me your guesses at the Nile_H address.
Sorry LNR, we're talking about you, not to you.
Re: AFP and other places
Date: 2004-08-25 10:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-23 11:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-23 06:37 pm (UTC)Actually, almost impossible to map without very sophisticated filters or abstraction logic. LNR is nodal to nodal people: everything overlaps here. Oxfrod/Greenend, Goths, Bi, Poly, Cambridge, geekery, rpg (which I want to get back into) and several flavours of fandom.
no subject
Date: 2004-08-23 12:20 pm (UTC)Small World? Tiny blinkin' world.
no subject
Date: 2004-08-25 10:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-23 03:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-08-23 03:29 pm (UTC)