Swarm Creativity Blog

Our team at MIT and galaxyadvisors has been creating e-mail and other social media based social networking maps for the last 15 years. The question we have to constantly answer is why it is a good thing to have these social networking maps, which I call “social landscapes”. The way to think about them is like a "Google Map for social landscapes". Google Maps has become immensely useful to me for driving the congested roads in Boston and Zurich. While I have been living in both cities for multiple decades, and usually know my way around, Google Maps has become indispensable for seeing where precisely I am, and where to go next. Through location tracking it shows me where precisely I am. And by aggregating the changes in anonymous location tracking information of thousands of drivers like myself, it shows me where the traffic jams and road construction is, taking me on the fastest way to my destination, and accurately predicting when I will reach my goal. Our social med...

Yesterday the NYT wrote about Barack Obama navigating the slippery slope of giving well-paid speeches (he gets up to $400,000 per speech) while avoiding the impression of selling out his status as a former president of the United States of America. This made me think again about the motivation pyramid I had described in “ Swarm Leadership” , from money, power, glory, and love, to enlightenment. Derived from Maslow’s pyramid , it occurred to me that there is an additional "status" layer. Barack Obama can translate his high status as former President of the US into money, by charging enormous speaking fees, however he has to be extremely careful not to reduce his status by giving the impression of cashing in.  We can observe this effect on all layers of the motivation pyramid, which in its revised format looks now as follows. The boundary between financial and social capital is highly permeable. Wealthy people can buy higher status as so-called philanthropists by dona...

TransparencyEngine (previously called "GalaxyScope") is a new powerful and easy-to-use tool to find the most influential people about any topic on social media.  You can try out TransparencyEngine here . (You will need a Twitter account and have to login with it.) In an earlier post I described how to use Condor to run queries for TransparencyEngine. While Condor is powerful in finding hidden trends and influencers on social media such as Twitter, Blogs, Wikipedia, and Web sites and online forums, it has quite a steep learning curve. If one is not a data scientist or computer savvy otherwise, Condor can be quite challenging to extract the results one is looking for. We therefore have developed a Web version of TransparencyEngine described in this post as a much simpler to use tool.   TransparencyEngine has been created by my colleague Joao Marcos de Oliveira as an easier-to-use alternative to Condor. Other than Condor i...