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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?"

9 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 neogeographer · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You've never used it have you? I now have the ability to instantly follow, and communicate with, all the experts in my field as if they were my co-workers. I know what they are reading about and what new technologies they are employing, instantly. No other exchange mechanism has been this easy to use and this powerful. It takes a deft hand to chose the right people to follow, true, but even a Slashdotter should be able to pick out those who represent expertise in their chosen field and could learn from the interactions now available, for free.

  2. Predicted by LordSnooty · · Score: 3, Informative

    There was an essay from around 2003 or maybe earlier which predicted that these so-called "news aggregators" would become as famous as the news-makers themselves, and would hold the most valuable positions in the information age. Someone refresh my memory, as it seems it might have been incredibly accurate.

    1. Re:Predicted by owlnation · · Score: 5, Funny

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

      He also coined "Global Village", and the problem with twitter is that it makes you realize that there's one hell of a lot of village idiots in the village.

    2. 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.

  3. Seems a good idea, but... by bbtom · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...their notion of expertise is limited to only the sorts of things Silicon Valley types think are valuable. 'Social media', 'cloud computing', even Apple.

    Actually, it'd be quite useful for both business and politics to be able to find if there are people on Twitter who are influencing people on science, who are influencing our democratically-elected representatives, our media figures and so on.

    (After writing that, someone from PeerIndex has just responded to me moaning on Twitter and said that they are tracking a wider variety of categories and will be exposing that in the future.)

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    1. Re:Seems a good idea, but... by azeemazhar.co.uk · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yeah. That would be me. We have a pretty flexible topic model, which let's you build authority networks within those topics. So for example, we have a super cheery one called "brain disorders' (mostly neurooncological); and things that are a bit broader like 'Web development frameworks'; as well as things like "space science" etc. anything missing, let us know and we'll probably rope you in to help us. cheers aa

  4. My prediction: by deadhammer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This will be gamed by spammers before it even launches.

    --
    I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
  5. Re:No by c0lo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If, recent, history tells us anything..... anything that is "social" that corporations jump on board with, will die a horrible fate.

    While I tend to agree with you, it is not the Twitter that would die a horrible death: it is the experts that the PeerIndex will identify would they choose to hire their twitter-voice to the corporations.

    To elaborate: the most influential persons are upright-standers. For example (without being limited to):

    • the "cool" persons (non-conformists, I-don't-give-a-damn-of-what-you-think)
    • persons which stand for some principles/values/etc, or which have expertise/wisdom/experience worth following (with no disrespect for any religious values, think Jesus and the apostles, if they would have used twitter ;) )

    What do you think would happen with their stand if they'd offer it for hire/sale to corporations?
    Granted, if this would spread at phenomenon level (rather than in some isolated cases), Twitter's fate will be the death: as anything with the sole purpose to distribute advertising (i.e. corporate spam).

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