How to describe and visualize interactions in networks? Static pictures are not enough, we must have flashes or videos. Keith Lyons helped again, I found this video Evolving twitter communities in his last blog post ( I couldn’t link to it, so I linked to YouTube).

“This is a dynamic network, showing what companies the 200 most prolific tweets were talking about. Both people and companies are nodes, and the edges change over the course of the day. Everytime a person tweets about a company, an edge is added connecting that person to the company. After 30 minutes, the edge decays. The companies are labeled, and the individuals are anonymized here.”

I like this. But so what? This is the way we live everyday, all the time and our brains can follow and pick up what is needed from the mess. This is one of the best external visualizations about networks, but… the point is to interpret the happenings inside human mind and external remains external.

Another blog that touched me during this CCK09 week was a young man who said that it is very easy to recieve the concept ‘connection’ because it has always been in the focus of developmental psychology. I agree with this opinion, my way is the same. Developmental psychology haven’t used the concept ‘connection‘ but ‘interaction‘ because it tells about mutual influences. Dialog is an appropriate concept, too. How can I interpret all the meanings of connection: internal and external (my vocabulary gives only connexion for trains or ships). Three levels given buy George (neural, social and conceptual) – this is basic knowledge in psychology, no news in it, easy to accept but doesn’t help me.

Should I re-invent or rewrite in my mind all my knowledge if I already have it? Psychology has produced great amount of knowledge about human actions in groups, teams and networks. Same unperfect people acting in all these social environments and repeating mistakes :) and perhaps new ones in this rapidly changing world.