Why doesn’t the Tory MP have Twitter friends?
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 »
Automating Marshall Kirkpatrick’s “Social Media Cheatsheet” process with Yahoo! Pipes
January 11th, 2009
Yahoo! Pipe for automating Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Social Media CheatSheet process
any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the “Google and wander” method?
He then outlines an almost perfect example of how to use social media to do this.
You should read his article before reading any further. It’s short and punchy and won’t take much time.
Read it? Good. Now you may have noticed in the comments section that the first commenter doubts that you can:
find one baker or candlestick maker that will go through all of that.
So I thought I’d see if I can automate the process. The short answer is that I can and I can’t. I can’t yet automate one or two really important bits and pieces, notably:
- ranking delicious bookmarks by popularity, not recency
- human editorial selection of bookmarks
Perhaps someone could help me with this.
But otherwise, I’ve published this Yahoo! Pipe, Automating Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Social Media Cheatsheet Process which automates 90% of the process, and may make it easier for the bakers and candlestickmakers.
All comments and — more importantly — suggestions and improvements gratefully received.
Monday, 12 Jan 2009 00:27: I’ve just added a bit to the pipe to list posts in descending order according to PostRank. Don’t know if this is useful
Tags: bloggers, pipes, readwriteweb, research, social media, yahoo
Posted in hack, how to, pipes | 8 Comments »
When you know you’ve become a corporate w*nker
January 9th, 2009
My friend James and I were having a conversation this morning. His frequent flyer programme has just downgraded him. This is, I feel, a sign of these troubled financial times. And of the fact that clearly neither of us has our priorities straight right now.
Posted in life | 1 Comment »
The Technorati Authority Yahoo! Pipe
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
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
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 »
Hard-to-resist incentive for DM harvesting
January 6th, 2009
Don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite this blatant. But it’s most impressive – the retailer is buying my permission (but only if I purchase.) Very clever indeed. Should this be best practice from now on?
What the cynical marketing hack in me likes best of all though is the voucher you receive on the click-through page:
So — you see — I receive that £150 discount anyway. I can only claim one discount (had I already signed up to the newsletter this voucher would be worthless.)
Tags: crm, direct marketing, dm, harvesting, newsletter, permission
Posted in found | Comments Off
Blogger typology: using IBM’s Many Eyes to build matrix charts
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
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: analysis, blogger typology, bloggers, charts, ibm, many eyes, research, visualization
Posted in blogger typology, research | 3 Comments »
Blogger typology: quantitative analysis step 1
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!)
Read the rest of this entry »
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
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: api, bloggers, blogs, perl, research, technorati
Posted in blogger typology, hack, how to | 8 Comments »
Referring to “this cell” using Excel conditional formatting
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 »
