The social network of the #Dominions chat channel

[lch]

The #Dominions IRC channel (http://dom3.servegame.com/wiki/IRC) on Gamesurge is quite popular among Dom3 newcomers and veterans alike. Just for fun, I've made a video (http://vimeo.com/9124477) that showcases the social component of it in form of a graph: The users are represented as nodes and edges are being formed when somebody addresses or mentions another user. The more this happens, the stronger the link grows. The links and the nodes vanish from the cache again after a while when they're not being reinforced. In that case, the graph may break up into multiple connected components, until all its members vanish or a new link happens to join them together again.

The video tracks the development over about two weeks of chat - look at the timestamp at the bottom racing forward. If you don't like the background music, try the other video (http://vimeo.com/9124802) instead.

[Foodstamp]

Very cool. I love stuff like this. I saw a more graphical version of what you are doing demonstrated on Lifehacker about 2 months ago. They were using it to track opensource development. Nodes represented people who submitted code and the edges were formed by activity. In that example, the Nodes would move around the project like bees moving around a honeycomb. Thanks for sharing!

[WraithLord]

nice :)

Now I wonder where could I find an easy to use, free, IRC client?

[Edi]

nice :)

Now I wonder where could I find an easy to use, free, IRC client?
http://www.hydrairc.com/

[rdonj]

Popular ones I've encountered include trillian, mirc, chatzilla if you use firefox/mozilla. Pyg is actually using (female dog)x, I'm not sure how easy that one is. I'm sure there are many more :)

*(female dog) is a replacement for another word which just happens to be censored on the forums.

[Sombre]

Pidgin is extremely easy to use.

[Sombre]

2:40 - Jurri and Sombre discuss ways to kill Maerlande.

2:45 - Maerlande dies.

[WraithLord]

:lol

Is that truth or fiction btw?


I subscribed to gamesurge. Tried a few IRC clients -chatzilla, bersirc and kvirce. They all had issues connecting to gamesurge IRC.
Chatzilla can't do the authserv thingi
bersirc can't be configured to authserv
kvirc looks the best so far but fails to connect as well.

Clearly it's my lack of experience with IRC at work here :)
I'll try again tomorrow, maybe I'll have better luck.

Thanks for the pointers I'll check them as well.

[Quitti]

mIRC is quite easy to use, it has horrible amount of settings but it can be set to automatically auth you and connect to gamesurge and so on. There's bound to be plenty of tutorials around if you just google stuff. I use Irssi (http://irssi.org/) myself, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone not familiar with commandline based stuff (vs. the normal graphical interface most clients and programs offer). Also, if you seriously have trouble connecting to a server, I'd be willing to bet that the problem is in NAT/Firewall settings and not in the client.

[Gandalf Parker]

Very cool lch. I might want to borrow that code.

[lch]

Very cool. I love stuff like this. I saw a more graphical version of what you are doing demonstrated on Lifehacker about 2 months ago. They were using it to track opensource development.
I think I saw what you describe for the development of Python: code_swarm - Python (http://www.vimeo.com/1093745)

Those vids are a little older, about two years, but he has done others for other open source projects as well. Very nice to look at indeed, especially with the annotations.

[Ink]

are you going to run some P-star models on this data now?

[Foodstamp]

Lch I found the one I am talking about. It is called "gource". Does pretty much the same thing and looks REALLY cool, check it out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3LO7_K0E1s&feature=related

[lch]

LOL, that looks like a video game. :D

pew pew pew

[Lingchih]

I use mirc. I even paid for it. Seems to work well, though the gui is lacking. Still, not hard to figure it out and set it up though.