The Wealth of Networks: With all the buzz about social networks, is it really so surprising to learn that inanimate objects have networks as well? Researcher and data junkie Valdis Krebs has developed social networking software called InFlow, which he recently used to map the purchases of political books from Amazon.com.

Analyzing political book purchases revealed some interesting trends: Krebs noted that patterns could be found in the purchases. In an early analysis of the political book purchases, after coloring the dots representing left-leaning books blue and the more conservative titles red, Krebs saw that books had a common intersection: the book “What Went Wrong?”, a book about Islam.

As the election loomed closer, he ran the software again in early October. This time, there were no shared titles. There were also now two, disparate blue groups with no intersection: one with a general group of titles and one with titles only about Obama. The general group of blue books had a wider variety of titles, where the red titles were much more concentrated on just a few titles. And the red books now included some titles that weren’t top hits before, such as “Rules for Radicals” and some of the Obama titles.

The crowd posited some ideas as to what was causing the changes, but one thing was clear: the books we purchase have their own stories to tell. For more on Krebs and his theory of Network Weaving, check out his blog.

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