Slashdot Mirror
Visualization of Egyptian Revolution On Twitter
An anonymous reader writes "A visualization of the network of retweets with the hashtag #jan25 at February 11 2011, at the time of the announcement of Mubarak's resignation, is available. The data was collected using Gephi connected to the Twitter Streaming API, converting the users and retweets to nodes and edges in a dynamic network. Though the data represents only approximately 10% of the retweets, it's interesting to see the large flow of interconnected retweets in just one hour." I've attached the video if you want to watch it.
What is this visualization supposed to look like? I get the impression of of a fertilized egg growing several layers of cells, but I'm unsure that is the intended effect.
But...but...this is totally different because it involves Twitter!!! Twiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitter!!!!
May I suggest listening to "Why Does This Always Happen to Me" by Weird Al Yankovic?
Stop whining. Now you have to pay your dues for the 4-year live feed of "internationally significant" OJ Simpson trial. (Outside USA he was relevant only as an actor in The Naked Gun trilogy, still not justifying complete lack of any other programming on CNN 'International')
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2guKJfvq4uI
Achille Talon
Hop!
In order to convey useful information, the following would have been helpful:
That said, this may seem to be pretty pointless to the average Slashdotter. But I'm betting that sociologists and intelligence services are looking at ways to glean information from just such information graphs. Identify the retweet source nodes geographically and we could see if this was an organized 'astroturfing' or maybe send the secret police to those locations.
Have gnu, will travel.
It looks so simple... makes you wonder why more countries don't have Twitter revolutions /s
Am I the only one out there that is getting a bit bored with the 24/7 coverage of this?
I mean...sure it is important...mostly to people on that side of the world, but man..enough is enough. Gotta be something new that's newsworthy...
Egypt is a regional power, and a significant US ally. It's literally undergoing a democratic revolution. The revolution has been mostly peaceful. The revolution has significant implications to long-term US interests. And the revolution has been extremely rapid.
There are plenty of other things going on. But for once, I'm with the news people: this is huge, this is newsworthy, and this is worth following.
You have to understand this from the perspective of the Obama administration. He's been rightly criticized for his inept and often contradictory foreign policy messages. His lapdogs in the news media are trying to give him every chance to get out in front of this story and look like he supported the Egyptians' freedom all along, even though it was barely 2 years ago that Obama took his apology tour to Cairo and praised Mubarak. The Egyptian people rightly see Obama as playing political calculus and backing whoever comes out on top of this, but CNN won't show you their "No You Can't" posters of Mubarak spoofing Obama's red white and blue Hope poster.
Not saying that...just that I "got it" after the 1st 24 hours of coverage.
Egypt's revolution, while good for it's people (if they can keep going towards democracy)...really has little effect on my life...so, why am I having to be inundated by constant live coverage. I'm sure there are domestic issues that do directly affect me that I'd be more interested being kept informed about. The current US budget fight for instance?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
sharing news of a democratic revolution is SPAM?
complaining because there's seeds in your orange juice is SPAM.
Twitter, just like the rest of the ENTIRE INTERNET, is only as good as you make it.
This seems entirely uninteresting. The only obvious conclusion you could draw from this data is that reaching a major milestone in a major social event triggers a major outburst of communications, which seems trivially obvious. For some interesting analysis on #jan25 tweets, see for instance this, an attempt to visualize influence levels between twitter users. It is interesting to note that there are relatively few highly "influential" tweeters, many of whom were arrested or detained at some point during the protest. This could possibly indicate that the Egyptian authorities were conducting a similar analysis.