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Sifting Authorities From Celebrities On Twitter

Posted by Soulskill on from the signal-to-noise dept.

holy_calamity writes "Celebrities like Britney Spears may be the 'most followed' on Twitter, but new service PeerIndex mines the content of tweets and tracks the spread of links and phrases to reveal the hidden experts in specific areas, from cloud computing to venture capital. The authorities the site finds for a given subject often have only a few hundred followers, but the content of their tweets is known to spread widely. Could data mining tools like this be the future for people or businesses looking for new collaborators, advisers and influencers?"

5 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Twitter Twaddle by Frosty+Piss · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Pretty much. The idea that anyone would go to Twitter for "experts" is, well, staggering. Twitter content it pretty much Twaddle.

    --
    If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
    1. Re:Twitter Twaddle by Serious+Callers+Only · · Score: 2, Insightful

      A more significant issue with this and any other measure of competence based on popularity is that being expert and being popular/linked to are not remotely connected.

      Expert != popular
      Expert != well liked
      Expert != referenced hundreds of times by people who know nothing about the domain

      Expert, at least in the old-fashioned sense, means knowledgable and skilled in a particular domain.

      The reason twitter is full of twaddle is that the minds of most people, collectively, are full of twaddle, and they like it that way.

      Just as slashdot attracts a certain sort of internet blow-hard pontificating on the inferiority of others, so twitter attracts those in search of trivia and light relief, mingled with the occasional interesting link. I use both sites :)

  2. Re:Predicted by blair1q · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Marshall McLuhan said "The Medium is the Message" nearly half a century ago.

  3. Re:If you want idiots by General+Wesc · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, only dumbasses like Tyler Cowen and Aza Raskin.

    There may not be much expert discussion on Twitter, but when you dogmatically insist that everyone on Twitter is an idiot you're actually identifying only one person as an idiot.

  4. Re:Predicted by DeadDecoy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's certainly a possibility, but tweeting a hyperlink seems like adding a superfluous layer of indirection when google and google scholar already do a pretty good job of looking up people by topic. But, to be fair, I wouldn't know if useful information can be extracted from tweets until it's done.