Marc A. Smith

Marc A. Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer- mediated interaction. He founded and managed the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, and led the development of social media reporting and analysis tools for Telligent Systems. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. Smith is the co-editor, with Peter Kollock, of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity, interaction, and social order develop in online groups. Smith’s research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Many “groups” in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see http://delicious.com/marc_smith/Paper). Smith’s goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics, and life cycles. At Microsoft, he developed the “Netscan” web application and data mining engine that allows researchers studying Usenet newsgroups and related repositories of threaded conversations to get reports on the rates of posting, posters, crossposting, thread length, and frequency distributions of activity. Smith applied this work to the development of a generalized community analysis platform for Telligent, providing a web-based system for groups of all sizes to discuss and publish their material to the web and analyze the emergent trends that result. He contributes to the open and free NodeXL project (www.codeplex.com/nodexl) that adds social network analysis features to the familiar Excel spreadsheet. A tutorial on social network analysis is evolving into a book and is freely available (http:// casci.umd.edu/NodeXL_Teaching). NodeXL enables social network analysis of email, Twitter, Flickr, and other network data sets.