From 9 to 11 of August I attended the ASONAM 2010 conference in Odense. The city, located in the Funen Island, is the third largest in Denmark and houses the H. C. Andersen Museum, next to place he was allegedly born. As for the conference, for three days it covered topics in social networks analysis and mining, with particular emphasis to the detection of communities and groups, and issues with security and terrorism networks.

Social network systems, like last.fm, play a significant role in Web 2.0, containing large amounts of multimedia-enriched data that are enhanced both by explicit user-provided annotations and implicit aggregated feedback describing the personal preferences of each user. It is also a common tendency for these systems to encourage the creation of virtual networks among their users by allowing them to establish bonds of friendship and thus provide a novel and direct medium for the exchange of data.