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***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org ***** Recent SOCNET postings might provide an interesting pilot for Wolfgang. Given the comment from Valdis on 'back channel emails', identifying opinion leadership from available-to-all communications may well prove problematic - perhaps even plain wrong. best to all, nick ________________________________ From: Social Networks Discussion Forum on behalf of Wolfgang Streibl Sent: Mon 1/15/2007 1:48 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Opinion Leading in Online Communities ***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org <http://www.insna.org/> ***** Dear members, my name is Wolfgang Streibl and I am Student of the Johannes Kepler University AUSTRIA. Due to my diploma thesis I came in contact with social network analysis and furthermore with the INSNA group. My thesis is dealing with opinion leading in online communities. The aim of my analysis is to identify opinion leaders among these communities. Therefore I am using a network approach to visualise the relation between the community members. After that I will start with a qualitative text analysis to find out with whom and about what these leaders are talking. So far so good. The problem I have is about the issue of privacy and data protection. For my text analysis I will need a lot of data out from the online forums. I am not sure about the fact, if you can copy these data legal with regard to idea that it is freely available or if you need permission of the community members. My studies on existing literature according to this topic showed that there is still a discussion about the public versus private status of such online communities. To sum up my problem, I am not sure about the way how I should collect my data from the internet. Do I need permission for quoting? If there is anyone who worked or is working on a similar topic I would be pleased to hear about your opinions and experiences concerning privacy, data collection in online environments. Thanks for your help! Best regards Wolfgang Streibl Wolfgang Streibl Student of the Johannes Kepler University Linz Austria Assistant of the Institute for Retailing, Sales and Marketing WWW: http://www.marketing.jku.at/e2887/index_eng.html Contact: [log in to unmask] _____________________________________________________________________ SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social network researchers (http://www.insna.org <http://www.insna.org/> ). To unsubscribe, send an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message. _____________________________________________________________________ SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social network researchers (http://www.insna.org). To unsubscribe, send an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message.