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Virtual worlds researcher Aleks Krotoski, who’s been working on a Ph.D. about social networks in virtual worlds, has posted about some of her findings, which are available in the form of an excellent video presentation you can find at the Subject Centre for Information and Computer Sciences (scroll down). You can also download the accompanying PowerPoint presentation. Aleks is doing very interesting research measuring the ties among people in the virtual world of Second Life, and is farming results from an opt-in survey she made of 10,000 SL residents. What’s to be learned here? According to Aleks, you can discern several things:

• a measure of social context, as defined by the actions of the members of the community
• a way to identify key people in that community
• a map of the direction information will spread, including rate and possible barriers

Amusingly, one of her slides shows the social ties that exist among 75 members of Second Life’s Feted Inner Core, i.e., those who are more or less SL’s best-connected residents. The FIC, of course, has caused no end of consternation over at the Second Life Herald. Among other things, Aleks’s research stands to show exactly how such sub-communities interact with the broader community of which they’re a part.

What’s really important here is that her work represents one of the first times anyone has taken real advantage of the way SL gathers people in one place to form such communities. As she points out, “community” is something that forms across both physical and virtual spaces. Aleks takes advantage of having so many people in “proximity” to glean some interesting points about bonds of trust and the flow of information. This is the kind of area in which virtual worlds could come to shed real light on what goes on not only there but in the offline world as well. Worth watching.