If you need to visualize and analyze internet or social networks, this software could help: http://gephi.org.

It's a tool for people that have to explore and understand graphs. This open source platform aims to explore graphs and complex systems like you manipulate images in Photoshop. This is currently one of the fastest graph visualization engine in open source, and provide an interactive way to handle networks, apply layouts and metrics, filter data and see the dynamics. It's free and runs on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.

Watch an introduction in video here: http://vimeo.com/9726202

A quick start tutorial is available here: http://gephi.org/2010/quick-start-tutorial/

You can test it with some datasets like the structure of the Internet made by Mark Newman in 2006: http://gephi.org/datasets/internet_routers-22july06.gml.zip.

Other datasets are available here: http://wiki.gephi.org/index.php?title=Datasets

If you plan to apply for a future conference, you may use Gephi to speed up your researches and present your results.

For example, check out this study on interactions between Science in Society actors on the Web: http://webatlas.fr/exhibition/eurosis/

- Sebastien Heymann
http://gephi.org