To better understand the process,a nd what it means about the campaign trail (trails?), I went on an information hunt. Well, I learned about The Presidential Election Process and the Campaign Trail. (The trail is typically singular, because it really referred to a single trail (tour). I learned from my discussion with Seb Pense that most American understood the Campaign Trail as a route that a presidential candidate went on, to “tour” the country to rally for support. (Hence, it is similar to the Oregon Trail). The trail is a forward looking “tour” that the presidential candidate embarked upon, and is certainly in flux to my initial understanding. I have always thought of the trail as a “historical trace” of the presidential candidates’ speeches, and media events (words and actions). No doubt, this mis-understanding has much to do with my own trails research.
I also came across The Impact of Social Media on the Campaign Trail:
From fund raising to media coverage, the Internet continues to exert a growing and dramatic effect on politics, the media, and the presidential campaign. In addition to providing platforms that allows people to connect and develop deep, diverse relationships, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter aggregate a tremendous amount of information. Social media allows us to chart our social graph, engage in a vast and noisy dialog, and discover niche-specific content.
The mention of a social graph in the above TRANS’ article also caused me to look up on Social Graph API on Google. Apparently, there is a group of Foo (Friends of O’reilly) who met yearly at a Social Graph Foo Camp (Feb 2008), too. So if I am interested about Social Graph, I should go there to network. However, the Social GRAPH thing did not appear to have much to do with “graphing”… (so it is not immediately useful at this moment).
The search led me to finding Social Network, Network Theory, and Social Network Analysis Software on Wikipedia.
A Social Network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency. The resulting structures are often very complex.
In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant ties between the nodes being studied. The network can also be used to determine the social capital of individual actors. These concepts are often displayed in a social network diagram, where nodes are the points and ties are the lines.
Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.
Based on the mentions of NODES on the Social Network, I find Network Theory and Analysis Software sound rather promising at this moment. Not to mention that Arnond and Joe have already mentioned network theory in one of our exploration sessions before.