Developers of statnet, a collection of packages for R for fitting Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM), issued a major update. First change is that the main package is now called ergm. Secondly, a set of additional packages has been made available. Apart from package network, that provides a class system for relational data on which statnet relies, there are couple of new ones, for example rSonia and dynamicnetwork facilitating work with the SONIA visualizer of network dynamics, but also many more. And, last but not least, thirdly, (almost) all of them are now available on CRAN websites.

Another interesting news is the forthcoming special issue of Journal of Statistical Software which is going to be devoted to these new developments. Preliminary versions of the articles are already available on statnet website. I especially welcome the paper by Carter Butts that throughly explains the functionality of the network package that has been available already for some time, but scarce on-line documentation made the conscious use very difficult.