Yesterday I watched the Papal Mass on television and I started to wonder how much buzz the trip received. Here is a Blogpulse chart, comparing the Pope’s visit to the US, with American Recession.
Here is a link to the actual query.
Tag Archive for 'community'
With all the news about the trial and tribulations of the Olympics torch this week, I thought to run a chart and see the blogosphere’s reaction to the issues. It is interesting to see that the torch is driving much more buzz than the issues. I cannot help but wonder if the events have actually overshadowed the reasons leaving no one to gain.
Protest is patriotic but just make sure your ideas, do not get lost in your methods.
A recent report, from OfCom of the UK, about social-networking shows their prolific growth and deep saturation in the UK. I first read about it in a MSN UK story located here and I found its classification system to oversimplify these users. Surely, we can come up with a more profound classification than: Alpha Socialisers, Attention Seekers, Followers, Faithful and Functionals. It seems to only scratch the surface of what is a much more complex eco-system driven by many different types of users and scenarios.
Lets first take a look at scenarios that could evolve as a result of shifting user profiles and maturation of the space. As my company reported last month, Facebook’s numbers have slowed in recent months but its not endemic of the death of social-networking in the UK. The fact is the numbers were growing at a rate that could not have been endured much longer.
But, have they reached critical mass?
This is an interesting question, but with 23% penetration in a country that has only 30 million people total online, it would seem social-networking is still red-hot in the UK. Certainly with that kind of reach, users would fall into more than a handful of types and morph from one classification to another. In fact, I believe that user intentions on social networks are so varied and amorphous that any attempt to classify must be primarily organic.
Lets take deeper look at my organic classification system.
Instead of a linear zoological approach to classes, it should appear more as a hexagon with overlapping interest and a sliding scale. Something like this:
Using this hexagonal approach, you could then further define user personality traits based on aggregate sentiment analysis. What does this mean? If you could take a predefined number of UK social network users evenly dispersed across the three majors and parse out there profiles into text. Using that text you could then score the sentiment into different buckets (eg. dating, networking, spammer) based on keyword recognition.
Further refining your chart to something like this:
Building out these finite profiles, you get a clearer picture of social networking users and how they interact and relate to one another. The more data ascertained the better the profile. Time of day, age and other demographics can also enhance the map to show more in-depth details of how people engage.
In a very general sense OfCom gets it right, they just leave out a big part of the picture. User interactions and how they effect user profiles. My father said it best when he said “you cannot be, all things to all people.”
This interesting chart from Blogpulse, shows key people being buzzed about in the blogosphere. It culls the data from over 70 million blogs and outputs the chart daily with most citations at the top. You can also dive further into the actual citations or the amount of spots they climb or descend daily.
An interesting takeaway for me, is that Obama is in 20th place. Does that put some merit into Hillary (who ranks 1st) supposedly saying Obama cannot win? Anything seem alarming to you? Perhaps Dolly Parton’s high ranking? Or, Britney Spears still hanging around?
What does it take to invent a new tool, product or idea? Ideas are born from somewhere deep down inside of us and can be as simple as Bellsouth’s Caller-ID or as complex as Google’s PageRank algorithm. Both of these inventions have something in common that is much less publicized - failure. That is right, it takes persistence and failure, to make something that improves our lives not some great creative mind.
Humility is most often learned the older you get because when you are young ego rules. I remember as a kid trying to come up with the most original and creative drawing in art classes. Its was the true test of whether you were an artist or just some hack with charcoal. We would debate incessantly classmates with great draftsmanship but poor ability to think in an agile and creative way. The reality of our situation was we were not original either. We did have one thing that set us a part drive. Because as we pontificated about the virtues of original thought we continued to test the boundaries of our own minds without fear of failure. We were free from the constraints of rigid academia to develop ideas, drawings, paintings, websites and more.
With retrospect I learned that age makes you more rigid and less willing to fail. Maybe its the reality of bills. One thing I always tried to keep in my core set of operational values is drive. Because with drive anything is possible. Dreaming big and performing agile is the combination that sets the passionate apart from the rest. I have also never lost the ability to turn my creative fire into well developed originality towards executing a better idea. Because eventually better will become original.
Don’t believe me ask Edison, Ford and Page?
Today was a holiday for me (Happy President’s Day), so I decided to run some Blogpulse queries on hot issues and the coming elections. The top three candidates were picked with the operators of three major issues to see how closely associated to them they were in the blogosphere. Now onto the data.
This first chart, is not one of the top issues, but of the current President linked with the Candidates name. Interestingly John McCain is not overly linked with Bush but Obama seems to index higher with Bush. A number of factors may be at work, but McCain may be successfully fighting the “third-Bush term” moniker.
The next chart shows the candidates linked with the term “health care.” Notably, Hillary is indexing highest in this category with Obama having a few peaks. Its probably related to her history as First Lady and the health care push of the Nineties. Reputation and how long consumers can be influenced by a candidates history lingers long after the issue moves to the backburner.
This chart shows “iraq” as the linked operator. I think the interesting finding here is that chatter seems to be on the rise even though violence is on the decline. Does this mean that conversation is the best way to solve a problem? Neville Chamberlain, famed negotiator during World War 2, may disagree but it seems to work in the blogosphere.
I saved the best for last. Finally, we see the linked operator as “recession.” The pattern is that talk in the media of the recession in the last couple months has caused significant spikes of recession chatter in the blogosphere.
All very cool data and a fun tool to experiment with and listen to about your brand.
Disclosure: I just want to state that Blogpulse is a free tool provided by my employer. The opinions here in now way reflect my company’s thoughts but are my very own ideas of why these charts say what they say.
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