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Measuring Real Time Public Opinion With Twitter
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that statisticians from the University of Vermont are hoping to harness the stream of messages flowing through Twitter to read public opinion and sentiment in real time. '"Twitter is a reflection of what people are interested in right now," says Peter Dodds, adding that the goal is to establish an index, akin to the Dow Jones industrial average, that can "give an overall sense of how a collective body of people are feeling at any given point in time.' Dodds says he and his colleagues are analyzing about 1,000 tweets each minute, or about a million a day, looking for trends in descriptive words and phrases that indicate moods and emotions. In addition, the two can monitor the public reaction to news or policy announcement and track it over time. The tool is still in its early stages, but eventually Dodds hopes that it could work similarly to Google Flu Trends, a Web tool that doubles as an early-warning system for flu outbreaks by detecting spikes in certain search terms. Since relationships and conversations are so intrinsic to how people communicate on Twitter, the researchers hope that observing how one user's mood is affected by another might shed some light on crowd behavior and emotional contagion. 'All of this data serves as a remote sensor of well-being,' Dodds says."
Another case of life imitating Onion.
This seems open to gaming the system since there are no controls on the users and Twit-bots are easily possible. Given that politicians are so d@mn poll-driven these days, this idea seems dangerous.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I suspect it is nothing compared to the twaddle on twitter.
Depends on who you follow try SciAm's current recommendations: science writer carlzimmer, evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen phylogenomics, theoretical physicist seanmcarroll, science writer RebeccaSkloot, NASA astronaut Mike Massimino Astro_Mike, or astronomer Phil Plait BadAstronomer
Actually, I visit Phil Plait's sites regularly, and really like his material (http://www.badastronomy.com/index.html and http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy).
His tweets are a different matter entirely - twaddle, and inescapably so due to the limitations of tweeting (what a pathetic term). You can find his twaddle at http://twitter.com/BadAstronomer. I encourage you to contemplate how poor a communication medium twitter really is, when it reduces someone with the aptitude and knowledge of Phil Plait to producing twaddle.
Now contemplate how intensely boring/stupid/inane the twaddle of a less gifted twitterer must be. Collectively, it's electronic flatulence - an outpouring of brainfarts.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
another example was the DOD response to the statue of liberty flyover. They were measuring the story in "tweets per minute" trying to gauge whether it was dying or not.
See the documents posted at
http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/newyorkcityflyover/
The ABC (Australian Broadcast Commission) did this for a live state -vs- state football match we have here. It was quite good. Measuring sentiment of who would win based on the positiveness or negativeness of 'tweets' (or whatever the fuck they're called).
Here
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