Six Degrees of Anyone
May 19, 2009
Catherine Rampell at the New York Times writes about Muckety on the Economix blog at nytimes.com
A reader recently referred me to Muckety.com, a neat site that maps out social networks.
By social networks, I don’t mean Facebook, but the actual relationships between various public figures (imaginary ones too, it seems). The site, founded by three journalists in 2006, uses online databases and other research to show the connections among people of interest.
Frankly, it’s catnip for conspiracy theorists.
Read more from the New York Times
The rebirth of news
May 14, 2009
Better technology coupled with new payment systems will not solve the acute problems faced by newspapers today, but should eventually provide new models to enable news to flourish in the digital age.
And already, there are signs that it will. New sources of news are proliferating online. Many, it is true, are unreliable. Most are badly funded. Some are the rantings of deranged extremists. But some—like Muckety, an American site which enriches news stories with interactive maps of the protagonists’ networks of influence… enhance society’s understanding of itself, and could not have existed in the old world.
Muckety Founder Discusses Journalistic Entrepreneurship
November 15, 2008
Chris Lavin of the San Diego Union Tribune has an interview of Muckety co-founder and president, Laurie Bennett, on the Poynter Institute’s web site.
Laurie Bennett is a lifelong journalist who sized up the shifting landscape of her profession years before most of her colleagues. In 1999 she left a job with Knight Ridder and moved into a farmhouse near, of all places, Podunk, N.Y.
Time
November 11, 2008
Time magazine online has a 2-minute bio of Obama friend and transition co-chair Valerie Jarrett which cites Muckety’s list of Chicago’s 100 most networked people.
She remains a key player in her hometown, where she serves as vice chair of the Chicago 2016 Olympic Committee and hobnobs with local entrepreneurs, journalists, politicians, union bosses and activists. Journalism website Muckety.com has listed her as one of the city’s “100 best networked.”
New York Times Topics
November 7, 2008
The New York Times added a Muckety story to the Timothy Geithner Navigator page which they call “a list of resources from around the Web about Timothy Geithner as selected by researchers and editors of The New York Times.”
June 16, 2008
When most of us think “social networking” the first thing that comes to mind are personal sites like Facebook or LinkedIn. Recognizing the power of personal connection, Muckety.com is a news site that works in a fantastic interactive social network map connecting muckety-mucks in each news story.
June 11, 2008
May 16, 2008
Adam Bonislawski, a real estate writer for the New York Post, calls Muckety “Today’s Internet time waster” in a May blog post.
Muckety.com is basically what you’d expect to get if you crossed the Oracle of Bacon web site with the membership list of Skull and Bones. Started two years ago by a trio of journalists, the site tracks the ties that bind the world’s various power players — diagramming, for instance, the web of acquaintances linking Paul Wolfowitz to, say, Swiss physicist Walter Kistler.
April 8, 2008
New Hillary strategist: Ties to her backers, labor
Mark Penn has been demoted because of his work for Colombia on a trade deal opposed by Hillary and some of her prominent labor supporters. As noted yesterday, one of his replacements — Hillary spokesman Howard Wolfson — owns a piece of a DC advocacy shop that also was retained by Colombia to do work on the same trade deal.
The other Penn replacement is pollster Geoffrey Garin (left). According to muckety.com, a site which provides interactive social networking charts, Garin does work as a “strategic researcher” for two labor unions — the AFL-CIO, and the American Federation of Teacher — which looks like a bit of a contrast to Penn, whose ties to the management side always grated on Hillary’s labor supporters.
Follow Muckety on Twitter