THIS WEEK 300 social media researchers have descended upon Dublin for the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media – an antidote, perhaps, to naysayers who dismiss the complexities of online networks as repositories for banal and witless chatter.

In its sixth year, the conference brings scientists and technologists from around the world together to talk about topics as diverse as using Foursquare to understand how urban dwellers shape their city to modeling the spread of disease from social interactions.

“As a term ‘social media’ can seem a bit vacuous and associated with online marketers who just want to sell you stuff,” said Dr John Breslin, researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, NUI Galway.

“But there is recognition that the web as a whole is social; it’s the way we do things now,” said Breslin, who is a co-organiser of the conference alongside the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and University College Dublin.

One of the keynote speakers was Prof Lada Adamic who has worked with HP Labs, investigated relationships within virtual world SecondLife and is carrying out research within Facebook.

Adamic studies memes – viral images, videos and text – and how they spread on Facebook. Her research looks at what kinds of media are popular, and how and why they spread like wildfire online.

It turns out that comedy and parody play an important role in propagation of online material, which explains why Chuck Norris jokes and LOLcat pictures seem to be everywhere.

This analysis has led to insight into online relationships and the psychology of internet interaction in comparison to the way people talk offline.

Adamic explains that the spread of viral messages online can be compared to biological evolution. “Memes will spread virally but they also mutate. Messages change as they spread through the network,” she said.

Humour and parody aside, Adamic has found that the most popular messages to be passed around online are cancer memes. “People post messages on Facebook along the lines of ‘If you know someone who had disease x, copy and paste’.

“Many people can relate to this and so it propagates successfully across networks, as do rare conditions due to the fact that people who post about this are usually well connected.”

Adamic is one of the few researchers who has access to Facebook data. There are also psychologists working within the social networking site on the area of sentiment analysis, she adds.

The areas they are looking at include what happens when people post negative Facebook status messages and how it might impact upon its network.

But what practical applications does Adamic’s meme research have? “Typically, what you want to do with memes is filter them out because they can skew a lot of things!”

On the other hand, this kind of analysis could be used to predict things such as someone’s political alliances. Adamic found that viral media related to science fiction – Star Wars and zombies – are associated more strongly with liberal leaning individuals, while conservative Facebook users are more likely to post about beer or taxes.

One take-home message that marketers would love to harness is the four keywords associated with successful viral media: true, funny, awesome, and cute.

Senior director of engineering at LinkedIn Igor Perisic talked about the future of the social networking site and how it plans to change how people use it.

“In five years time, we want LinkedIn to provide very accurate job recommendations, but also be more than a place for jobs,” he said.

“You need many elements to be successful, not just job offers – recommendations for good courses to take, people to meet and so on.

“New LinkedIn users have grown up on Facebook, so they get how to use social networking sites to their full benefit.”

ICWSM also hosted an industry-specific event alongside the academic conference. “It’s a chance for world-class start-ups like Datahug, Storyful and NewsWhip to discuss the future of news generation through social media with the likes of the Guardian and C-Span,” said Breslin.

“There is a very large international academic research community here, so it’s a great opportunity for Irish researchers to meet their peers and share research on the beneficial applications of platforms like Facebook and Twitter.”

Conor Murphy, CEO and co-founder of Irish company Datahug, talked about how his business unlocks the value that exists within enterprise networks.

“It’s all about relationships. We automatically and privately extract this information and provide you with relationship scores between people in your company.”

With a distinctly Irish perspective, Murphy explains that Datahug wants to “automate the pub” by finding out who knows who within an enterprise setting, proving that social media is nothing new and just an alternative way of networking over a pint of Guinness.

Marie Boran is a PhD candidate in DERI, NUI Galway