[Air-l] Research on closed social networking sites

[Paul DiPerna]

Sandra,

I did a kind of macro-level analysis of social network sites about a year ago, which I presented at ASA.  I ran into the same difficulty as your friend.  Based on my experience, there had been very little empirical research on LinkedIn.  At least until last summer, nearly all research focused on MySpace, Facebook, orkut, or Friendster. 

In the conference paper there is a discussion on LinkedIn in the series of site histories, and then again in the analytical and concluding sections.  If anything, the notes may be useful.

If your friend is interested, she can access the conference paper here:
http://blauexchange.org/connector_website_model_fullreport.pdf

Shorter, published version here:
http://www.jiti.net/v07/jiti.v7n1.015-020.pdf


 Hope this helps,

 Paul



-----------
Paul DiPerna
Blau Exchange
http://www.blauexchange.org
online ID: http://claimid.com/pdiperna




------ Original Message ----
From: Sandra C. Bavasso Roffo <scbr at sinectis.com.ar>
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Sent: Tuesday, June 19, 2007 12:27:23 AM
Subject: Re: [Air-l] Research on closed social networking sites

Hi All,

A friend of mine is finishing her thesis that is about social networking 
sites *nothing original there* but her work has an original a twist.

As part of her research she is trying to compare the attitude of the same 
group of people in a completely closed social networking (closed to alumni 
of one specific University) against their attitude in a more open online 
community like LinkedIn.

The reason she is using LinkedIn, is that her test group is more into 
business and career development so most of the alumni are already using 
LinkedIn.

She is working with the 90-9-1 theory of participation and trying to see 
also how the theory of the "weak links" as generators of business and career 
opportunities works or not on both sites.

I am helping her a little and while we have found extensive research on 
Facebook, we have found almost nothing on LinkedIn.

Any recommendation? She is already sending her survey out but some specific 
bibliography on LinkedIn will be appreciate!

Thanks,

Sandra :) 

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