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David Lazer (blessed be his name) tweeted my attn to a nice looking
article:

Social selection and peer influence in an online social network
     Kevin Lewis, Marco Gonzalez, Jason Kaufman
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/12/13/1109739109
on how similar tastes > friendship, but friends don't > similar tastes.

This is reminiscent of the article that great bibliometrician Howard
White, Nancy Nazer (now a bank VP) and I did some years ago on social
networks and citation networks in which we found that over time scholars
who cited each other tended to become friends, rather than friends tending
to cite each other.

Howard White, Barry Wellman and Nancy Nazer. 2004. "Does Citation
Reflect Social Structure: Longitudinal Evidence from the `Globenet'
Interdisciplinary Research Group." Journal of the American Society for
Information Science and Technology, 55, 2: 111-26.

So birds of a feather do eventually flock together.

  Barry Wellman
  _______________________________________________________________________

   S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC NetLab Director
   Department of Sociology 725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388
   University of Toronto Toronto Canada M5S 2J4 twitter:barrywellman
   http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman fax:+1-416-978-3963
   Updating history: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php
  _______________________________________________________________________

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