I’m always interested in ways of using social networking sites as massive pools of data for researchers to mine. So on that note check out The Adventures of Auck‘s post on Cultural Variation and Social Networks. The post is more of a rumination, accompanied by some simple statistical analyses, than a detailed exposition. But it is does highlight the potential of using social networking sites (he uses Twitter) to investigate a specific question, which in this case is: Do bilingual communities have different social network structures to monolingual communities? He’s got some pretty intriguing results, and like him I’m not sure what to make of them, but I certainly hope this is something he’ll develop in the future.
On another note, the blog also examines the surprising relationship between language evolution and Acacia trees.