Archive for the ‘research’ Category
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Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
This is a map of the current US congressmen and women who are currently on Twitter (you can click it to see a bigger map where you can read the names.) The direction of the arrows show who follows whom, and the size of the blobs indicates how “popular” a given congressperson is among their twittering peers (where “popular” means something like “is followed by many of their peers.”) Colours indicate party affiliation (for those of you who — like me — don’t live in the ‘States and who — like me — need reminding from time to time, the Democrats are the blue dots.)
Network of US Congress twitterers showing citation frequency. Click for bigger.
A cursory glance at this map shows a few things:
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Tags: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John Culberson, mapping, Neil Abercrombie, network analysis, networks, twitter, united states congress, visualization
Posted in networks, twitter | 49 Comments »
Why doesn’t the Tory MP have Twitter friends?
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
This is a map of the eight Westminster MPs who are currently on Twitter, and the relationships between them. The larger the blob, the more followers they have among their peers. Apparently they’re a fairly clubbable lot, all – that is – except for Grant Shapps who (it seems) currently has no MP friends on Twitter. I’d say that it’s early days yet, but Mr Shapps appears to have been broadcasting since March 9th 2008. That’s an age in Twitter years. In that period, he has replied to 5 people out of a total of 249 tweets. Lots of people have tried to reach him.
I think that it’s nice that he’s so busy (after all, he has a constituency to run and a government to topple) but do think that if he’s going to do this, he ought to pay a little more attention.
Who (other than each other) are MPs most likely to follow? If we wanted to get a story in front of their noses, who would we most want to talk to? Here’s the list. Tweetminster is like Tweetcongress but with more tea and scones and fewer public representatives. The ubiquitous Stephen Fry is in place, of course. It wouldn’t be Twitter without him.
Tags: Andy Reed, David Lammy, Grant Shapps, Jo Swinson, Kerry McCarthy, Lynne Featherstone, mapping, mp, network analysis, networks, Tom Harris, Tom Watson, twitter, visualization
Posted in networks, twitter | 16 Comments »
The Technorati Authority Yahoo! Pipe
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009
Yahoo! Pipe to pull Technorati API data for multiple blogs
Over the holidays, I started playing with a new Yahoo! pipe to pull information from Technorati into a spreadsheet. The reasons why I wanted to do this are covered in this post about the quantitative analysis of blogs, and my eventual perl-based solution to the problem is covered in this post.
The problem with the perl-based approach is that it’s a little inaccessible to people who aren’t comfortable using a command line environment. So I really wanted to make something that more people would feel comfortable using, and perhaps play around with.
So, with some help and kind words from Bob Briski, one of whose pipes I’d stumbled across and bookmarked during my research for this project, I decided to finish off the pipe and publish it so that others could use it, or (better still) improve upon it.
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Tags: google docs, google spreadsheet, pipes, technorati, yahoo
Posted in blogger typology, hack, how to, pipes | 10 Comments »
Kerry’s map of the top 50 twittering journalists
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009
My colleague, Kerry Gaffney, has just posted her analysis of the network formed by the top 50 UK journalists on Twitter.
She says:
Looking at the original map, it immediately seems obvious that the PR bunnies of the world are far more likely to link to each other, but just to make sure we dropped both datasets through UCInet and looked at the density scores, and sure enough the PR network is almost twice as dense, sharing 1459 ties compared to 785 for journalists. Or a ratio of .595 against .320 for following within the group, so not quite double, but not very far off.
If you’re interested in this sort of thing (and who, these days, is not?) then I recommend that you take a look at Kerry’s analysis.
Tags: journalists, kerry gaffney, mapping, maps
Posted in networks, twitter | 1 Comment »
Blogger typology: using IBM’s Many Eyes to build matrix charts
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009
Thanks to IBM’s Many Eyes service it’s relatively simple to create complicated visualizations that my current version of Excel can’t handle. For example, this “matrix chart” that I built using Excel’s bubble chart function is clearly unacceptable. I can’t easily link statements or values to the X and Y axes, and there’s lots of overlapping that seems (after many attempts) to be impossible to fix.
Matrix chart built using Excel
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Tags: analysis, blogger typology, bloggers, charts, ibm, many eyes, research, visualization
Posted in blogger typology, research | 3 Comments »
Blogger typology: quantitative analysis step 1
Sunday, January 4th, 2009
I’ve published the first dump of survey and “blog metrics” data from the blogger questionnaire as a spreadsheet on Google Docs. Many, many thanks to all of you who volunteered your information.
Please feel free to use this as you see fit for your own projects. I’ve anonymised this data (just because it’s best practice, not because I think any blogger would be mortally offended by having the world know what inspires them to blog!)
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Tags: amazon, analysis, bloggers, box plot, boxplot, conversation index, excel, getafreelancer, graph, mechanical turk, visualization
Posted in blogger typology, measurement, research | 5 Comments »
A simple perl script to interrogate the Technorati API
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009
Sometimes (for instance when I’m doing the research for the blogger typology) you need to get a whole load of Technorati data for a whole load of blogs.
This research can (of course) be done by hand. And (of course) for a long list of blogs this would take a great deal of time. Handily, Technorati provides developers with an API that lets you automate those queries. An API (for those of you who don’t know) is an Application Programming Interface – a toolkit provided by a service or application (in this case by Technorati) that lets other computer applications ask it questions and use the answers for their own purposes. It may be helpful to think of APIs as being like the knobs on top of a Lego brick that let you stick other Lego on to it without in any way changing the nature of the brick itself. On the other hand it may not be so helpful after all.
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Tags: api, bloggers, blogs, perl, research, technorati
Posted in blogger typology, hack, how to | 8 Comments »
Referring to “this cell” using Excel conditional formatting
Sunday, December 28th, 2008
Since writing this post, three simpler, better ways of solving the problem have been submitted in the comments section. Feel free to read this post, but look to the comments for the solution!
If you already know about conditional formatting and navigated here via Google, please jump straight to the hack. If not, I hope the following introduction is useful. You might also like to check out the WikiHow introduction to conditional formatting in Excel. This post is actually concerned with an interesting hack that lets you reference the value of a cell itself when setting up formula-based conditional formatting rule.
Conditional Formatting
Excel’s conditional formatting feature is a boon to heavy spreadsheet users like me. It is a flexible and powerful tool that (among other things) lets me highlight data according to a set of rules so that I can easily spot the interesting bits in what would otherwise be an almost impossibly dense and meaningless cloud of numbers. Here’s an example; a table of the correlations between 32 different statements (taken from some ongoing work looking at a simple blogger typology.)
Tags: conditional formatting, excel, hack
Posted in hack, how to, research | 8 Comments »
Your help needed to develop “blogger typology”
Sunday, December 21st, 2008
(NB: If you have both a blog and a short attention span, please skip the article, and go straight to this short survey. Many thanks!)
What is a blogger? Everyone seems to think they know, and yet the longer I work in this area, the more I realize I know nothing. And the less I know, the more suspicious I become of marketers who use vague terms like “conversation” (which has – after all – become little more than a Latinization of the ghastly “dialogue”.) I can just about understand what Technorati means when they talk about
The ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation.
…but there are an awful lot of long words that could turn out to hide an awful lot. And that’s the carefully thought-out distillation of a bunch of experts. Most of us, most of the time fall back on lazy or confusing language. We talk about “social media” and never stop to think that — depending on who’s doing the talking (and what they have to sell) — what is meant by that apparently innocuous phrase shifts wildly from speaker to speaker.
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Tags: bloggers, blogging, research, survey
Posted in blogger typology, research | 12 Comments »
Some Twitter Social Network Analysis
Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
On November 10th, Stephen Davies collected together a list of “UK PR people on Twitter” According to PostRank, this (and his earlier post, “UK Journalists on Twitter“) are the most popular posts on his blog.
Then a couple of days later, Stephen Waddington pushed that list through TwitterGrader to come up with his list of “Top 50 UK PR people by Twitter influence“
A couple of weeks ago, I was looking for a seed list with which I could test our “whitelist” and “canonify exception” rules on Rufus (the network analysis tool that Porter Novelli has been working on for the past six months.) This isn’t the right place to go into it, but to put it simply, the whitelist restricts the search to domains that are on the list (like a guest list), and the canonify exception list stops Rufus from chopping the subdomains or directories off the list (without this, a site like sethgodin.typepad.com would just show up as typepad.com or en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis would show up as wikipedia.org. Rufus, by the way, is named after the George Carlin character in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
My colleague, Tim Hoang used to work with Stephen W., so he sent him the image. Wadds then posted “the map on his blog“. My flickr page has never had so much activity.
Here’s the original graph:
Lots of people started drawing conclusions about the nature of PR, or the nature of Twitter from the graphs. There was lots of interesting speculation. Some people thought that this demonstrated how introverted the twitter crowd is. Others thought that it showed how introverted the PR/Social media crowd is. Others seemed to think that it didn’t matter.
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Tags: citation analysis, graph, influence, influence mapping, network analysis, networks, research, social media, twitter
Posted in influence, networks, twitter | 29 Comments »
