Archive for Twitter
by Bill Ives
August 20, 2011 at 3:08 am · Filed under
Social Media, Twitter, Web 2.0
I had not been paying too much attention to Klout until I saw this article in the New York Times, Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored. I skimmed it and tweeted about it to save the link for further reading. I often use my Twitter, @billlives, as a social bookmarking tool so I remember and have access to posts and articles I want to save. I then go through my tweets twice a month and it gives me an overview of what I thought was important during this time. Then I do a blog post that lists the tweets I found really important as a way archive these tweets. I am sure there are more efficient ways to archive Twitter but I find this practice a useful exercise.
Well, the tweet on Got Twitter? You’ve Been Scored got retweeted six times within a few hours so this action caused me to look more closely at the article. I then tweeted that I was inspired by the RTs to write a blog post on the article and I got two replies for the six who said they were looking forward to the post. I was pleased as this type of exchange is how Twitter is supposed to work. I also met a few new Twitter friends in the process.
The article itself exposed me more to the growing movement behind such tools as Klout and Peerindex. It is about all of us getting a number, similar to Robert Parker’s quantification of wine. While there is more objectivity here that with Parker, the underlying motive is the same, the quantification of the world. This is a topic I have covered several times. I did a four part series on this blog that began with Rising Above the Over Quantification of Content: Part One: Parker vs. Piaget.
In this post I quoted, Adam Gopnik in the September 6, 2004 issue of the New Yorker, “(Parker) was uncannily successful because (he was an) apostle of a radical American empiricism – an insistence that facts and numbers could show you what was really going on, against everything tradition told you…The debate is not about whether the numbers are right but whether it is right to have numbers.”
In a similar perspective, Nick Carr quotes Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, in his Atlantic article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, that it is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Carr adds that what Fred Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind. I would add: and what Robert Parker did for wine. Nick goes on to write, “in Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed.”
Personally, I think a little ambiguity and complexity is good. So how does this relate to someone’s reputation on the Web? Personally, I follow people for many different reasons so a single score is not going to help too much. I also follow people related to three different twitter accounts I am connected with (@billives, @darwineco, and @outstart). The fact that Klout does offer the top ten topics a person is known for helps but there is still a gap between the complexity of why I follow people and a score, in the same way I might like a wine for many different reasons, occasions, and food parings.
I look at the Klout scores of people I know and there is a rough correlation with my views of what works for me but certainly not a precise one. Like wine, I think this is an area best left to the full range of human cognitive abilities and the multiple associations the human mind can make. The Klout score of someone I do not known might help except for the fact that I know it is not completely accurate for my needs, only a clue about what to pursue in more depth. For the record, I did check my scores on two of these tools and my Klout score is 55 and my Peerindex score is 59 but I am not really sure what this means.
by Bill Ives
August 2, 2011 at 3:10 am · Filed under
Social Media, Twitter
I read an interesting article in the Neiman Labs blog, Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why we need a new paradigm for our social media platforms. It asked the question: Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? It clarified the reason for this question as we treated these two forms of expression quite differently. Text is seen as stable and more permanent and this has legal implications.
The article compares the two as follows: “Text, we figure, is: conclusive, in that its words are the deliberate products of discourse; inclusive, in that it is available equally to anyone who happens to read it; exclusive, in that it filters those words selectively; archival, in that it preserves information for posterity; and static, in that, once published, its words are final. And speech, while we’re at it, is discursive and ephemeral and, importantly, continual.”
The article concludes: “The framework of text and speech falls apart once we recognize that Twitter is both and neither at once. It’s its own thing, a new category. Our language, however, doesn’t yet recognize that. Our rhetoric hasn’t yet caught up to our reality — for Twitter and, by extension, for other social media.”
I find it interesting that this debate occurred when text as we know it was first introduced through the Greek phonetic alphabet. Plato commented on this latest information technology breakthrough of his time. He said in The Republic that text is a better means, than the oral tradition, to convey and store information. Then he cautioned the limits of text in Phaedrus that meaning is better derived from the dialog of viewpoints.
When blogs first appeared similar discussions about the hybrid nature of social media arose. The researcher Alexander Halavais said that blogs offer “Discourse at the boundary between conversation and publication.” They can give greater context and connection.
Blogs took the conversational aspects part way through their informal style and the opportunity for comments. Now Twitter moves the dialog much further through its real time ease of use. The Neiman article noted and interesting twist in this direction. It commented that, “Wall Street Journal outreach editor Zach Seward talked about being, essentially, the voice of the outlet’s news feed on Twitter. When readers tweeted responses to news stories, @WSJ might respond in kind — possibly surprising them and probably delighting them and maybe, just for a second, sort of freaking them out.” Now the Web talks back at you through Twitter, more so and faster than with blogs.
The article notes that text has been “considered an artifact and a construct, has generally been a noun rather than a verb, defined by its solidity, by its thingness — and, in that, by its passive willingness to be the object of interpretation by active human minds.” But now this could be changing as it becomes more dynamic.
They note that Twitter is not very good at the archival part yet but it should improve. This is one reason that I post my favorite tweets on this blog every two weeks so I can go back to them. I also find it an interesting recap of what I found useful in the past two weeks when I set up the post. One thing that is needed is better curation tools and they mentioned, Storify. It allows you to create stories using social media.
The article concludes that “our text-ordered world is resolving back into something more traditionally oral — more conversational and, yes, more ephemeral. ‘Chaos is our lot,’ Clay Shirky notes; ‘the best we can do is identify the various forces at work shaping various possible futures.’ One of those forces — and, indeed, one of those futures — is the hybrid linguistic form that we are shaping online even as it shapes us… A paradigm we might call “Twitter.
by Rob Paterson
June 18, 2011 at 2:31 pm · Filed under
Obama, Politics, Politics 2.0, Twitter
Twitter and Facebook is still foreign territory for most politicians. Not for long I think
President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign could get a social media boost after some major changes announced today.
The big news: the president himself will be tweeting on occasion, according to TechCrunch. Each presidential tweet will be signed “-BO.”
To this point, Obama’s White House staff has been posting for him to @BarackObama. He’s joked in the past about having never tweeted (though he didtechnically tweet this), but that will soon change.
Also notable is that the President’s 2012 campaign staff will start managing his Twitter and Facebook accounts, effective immediately, rather than the White House staff.
The announcements were detailed in a blog post on Obama’s campaign website, which notes the re-election campaign is underway and Obama is “counting on all of us to lead this organization from the grassroots up.”
by Bill Ives
May 9, 2011 at 3:32 am · Filed under
Twitter, Web 2.0
There was an interesting article in the New Scientist, Happier people tweet together. Psychologist Johan Bollen of the University of Indiana and colleagues tracked 102,000 Twitter users over six months, analyzing the 140-character-or-less text from 129 million of their tweets with standard techniques from psychology. In other words. “they measured the emotional content of the tweets as reflected in the presence of positive or negative words from a lexicon previously established by psychologists. From this they could assess the “subjective well-being” of the users through their tweets.”
They found that happier people – those recording a high subjective well being – tended to be tweet with people who were also happier. The same was true for those who were gloomy. “It turns out that Twitter users are preferentially linked to those with whom they share a similar level of general happiness,” says Bollen.
Of course there could be many explanations for these results. The researchers suggested happy or unhappy people may seek out similar people as reflected in their tweets. Another possibility as Bollen suggests, “it could be that the emotions expressed even in short tweets have an infectious quality, lifting peoples’ spirits or filling them with gloom, depending on what they read.”
There have been a number of studies that indicate that people with similar states of “subjective well-being” tend to be involved in social networks in the physical world. This study suggests that that behavior may carry over to the virtual world.
In addition, sentiment analysis of text is a subjective and not yet precise art. This is true whether the analysis is done by humans or by computers. It was unclear from the article but looking at 129 million tweets must have involved some machine support. Perhaps the machines only literally looked at what they were directed at and did not make “decisions” on the sentiment.
Perhaps I will start looking at my fellow tweeters. Since I tend to tweet more about ideas that feelings and those I interact with most on Twitter do the same, there may not be real indication. I know I use terms like good read to praise a blog post but not sure if this truly a reflection of my “subjective well-being.” For the record I do tend to think of myself as a happy person with a positive outlook.
What do you think?
by Bill Ives
March 11, 2011 at 11:39 am · Filed under
Social Media, Twitter
Here is another useful study by Nora Ganim Barnes at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research. This study is on the usage of social media by US charities. The new study compares organizational adoption of social media in 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 by the 200 largest charities in the United States based on a list compiled annually by Forbes Magazine.
To gather this data, the Center for Marketing Research conducted nationwide telephone surveys of the nonprofits on the Forbes list. Their findings are based on detailed interviews with executives of the 78 charities that responded. Those that participated had a wide range in mission, average gifts, and total revenue. They include the Salvation Army, Easter Seals, Habitat for Humanity, Shriners Hospital for Children and the American Heart Association
In 2007, the first study on the use of social media by large charities showed that these large non-profits were leading large and small businesses as well as universities in their familiarity with, usage of, monitoring of, and attitude towards social media. One year later, in 2008, the second study showed that the lead in knowledge, adoption and positive attitude was still intact.
By 2009 the research found that 97 percent of charitable organizations were using some form of social media. Now the latest iteration of their research finds that all of the top charities in the US are using at least one form of social media, either blogs, podcasts, message boards, social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare), texting or video blogging. Usage of LinkedIn has jumped from 36% to 58% in one year, while the use of MySpace as a platform has declined from 30% to 22%. Both Foursquare and texting were new in the 2010 study and made respectable showings at 28% and 44% respectively.
At present sixty-four percent of the organizations are blogging, showing no significant change from last year. Facebook (97%), Twitter (96%), and YouTube (92%) are now the most common tools used Ninety percent of those studied in 2010 report social media is very important to increasing awareness of their mission. The researchers concluded that while these organizations are best known for their non-profit status and their fundraising campaigns, they demonstrate an acute awareness of the importance of Web 2.0 strategies in meeting their objectives.
This is great work by the non-profits. Now business has to catch up.
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