Just what is local these days - Small world mobile networks vs local social media

Fascinating piece in Nature, about some work by Barabasi - who really understands social networks - after all, he wrote the books !

Albert-László Barabási and his colleagues show that most people, perhaps unsurprisingly, are creatures of habit. They make regular trips to the same few destinations such as work and home, and pepper these with occasional longer forays such as vacations.

The distances people covered varied widely between individuals, but follow a similar pattern — most people move on average a short distance on a daily basis, whereas a few hardy souls move long distances in a short time.

The data showed that nearly three quarters of the 100,000 customers surveyed moved "mostly" within a 10 mile radius of home. Mostly means about 67 per cent of the time. There's also significant group of the population that behaves quite differently. Between 2 and 3 per cent of those studied "regularly" traveled to locations more than a 100 miles away. Regularly means almost every week. In other words, the study proves the existence of jet-setters and business travellers.

Seems like our small-world network structure in action to me, though Barabasi notes:

“It’s weird to see such mathematical regularities in such complex behaviours,” says Brockmann. The challenge now is to find out why something as complex as human movement follows such consistent patterns, he says..

Which surprises me, as I would have thought it deduceable en masse from small world network theory. I must be missing a trick - any thoughts ?.

Juxtapose this with this interesting thought from Adrian Monck:

We live in a strange world. I work forty miles from where I sleep. The shopping gets delivered and the garbage gets taken away. The Atlantic and New Yorker arrive by post. Friends, work and everything else arrive via broadband. That’s my life.

There’s not much local about it. Strike that. There really is nothing local about it.

Adrian was talking about the Washington Post's attempt at "Local Reporting" in Loudoun, which seems to have not gone as well as expected. Interesting, since we are clearly pretty localised. Clearly some missing link here.

Still, it is always good to have some real data in Social Networking, an area which too often these days makes fine art look like a data driven subject*

* which of course it increasingly is, or at least the prediction of prices is.