My recent interview with Bernardo Huberman, Director of HP's Social Computing Lab was fascinating because the research seems to uncover basic human traits that could be universal.

Mr Huberman and his team have been publishing the results of their studies. Here is a selection and it all looks fascinating. This is much better material than the hype and spam driven social-media-expert-type drivel out there that pretends to know without running tests and experiments.

I picked out the following from a longer list that you can find here:

HP Labs : Research: Social Computing Lab

»Feedback loops of attention in peer production
Fang Wu, Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo Huberman
Why does the distribution of user contributions obey a power law?

»Stochastic Models of User-Contributory Web Sites
Tad Hogg and Kristina Lerman
Fans, the law of web surfing and users' interests combine to promote and rate stories on Digg.

»A Persistence Paradox
Fang Wu and Bernardo Huberman
How persistence does not lead to success

»Effects of feedback and peer pressure on contributions to enterprise social media
Michael J. Brzozowski, Thomas Sandholm, and Tad Hogg
Attention matters in motivating contributions to enterprise social media. But some types of attention matter more.

»Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope
Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu
the social network that matters is not the one you declare.

»Predicting the popularity of online content
Gabor Szabo and Bernardo A. Huberman
popularity, youtube, digg, attention, predicting future downloads.

»Social network collaborative filtering
Rong Zheng, Dennis M. Wilkinson and Foster Provost
User-generated social networking links can be as predictive as algorithmically identified "neighbors" in recommender systems

»Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity
Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu
How to solve the digital commons dilemma.

»How public opinion forms
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman
How web discourse evolves. To appear in the Proceedings of the Workshop on Internet and Network Economics-2008

»How Do People Respond to Reputation: Ostracize, Price Discriminate or Punish?
Kay-Yut Chen, Scott Golder, Tad Hogg and Cecilia Zenteno
How people use reputation information.

»Popularity, novelty and attention
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman
Whether to use popularity or novelty to elicit attention

»Novelty and Collective Attention
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman
How does novelty affect the attention of large groups

»Comparative Advantage and Efficient Advertising in the Attention Economy
Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
Comparative advantage in the attention economy can be used to maximize the revenues a company gets from advertising.

»The Economics of Attention: Maximizing User Value in Information-Rich Environments
Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
Deciding what to display.

»Bootstrapping the Long Tail in Peer to Peer Systems
Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
How to provide any content over the web while avoiding free riding.

»The Dynamics of Viral Marketing
Jure Leskovec, Lada A. Adamic and Bernardo A. Huberman
How effective is viral marketing?

»Management Fads, Pedagogies and Soft Technologies
Jonathan Bendor, Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
What makes fads come and go?

»Social Structure and Opinion Formation
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman
How do opinions form?

»The Dynamics of Reputations
Bernardo A. Huberman and Fang Wu
How reputations get established, grow and decay.

»Status as a Valued Resource
Bernardo A. Huberman, Christoph Loch and Ayse Onculer
Why do we seek status?

»Competitive Dynamics of Web Sites
Sebastian M. Maurer and Bernardo A. Huberman
Competitive dynamics on the web unfold in surprising ways, leading to a sudden transition to winner-take-all markets.

»The Economics of Surfing
Eytan Adar and Bernardo A. Huberman
Information providers can exploit the differences in surfing behavior exhibited by web users.