ReporTwitters Blog

Just like the word ‘blog’ is one of the most frequently used words on blogs, Twitter lingo is also quite self referential. You can check that out at Twitterverse, a cloud creator of the most frequently used words on Twitter during the past one, ten hours or week. You can also opt to have a dual set of words. Today, the top of the cloud looked like this;

Also at language level, an interesting toy to check out is Twitterment’s compare tool. You can input two opposites or a pair of terms you want to analyse into an analysis box and see the graphs of twitter usage of the term. You can also (geo)locate terms when big news breaks somewhere.

Twitterment was created by the guys at the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering of the University of Maryland. They also made maps of the global distribution of twitter users. Incidentally, Tokyo tops city rankings in terms of Twitter users, according to UMBC’s map Next is New York, then a bunch of other mainly Eastcoast North American cities and Madrid ranks 10th.

Michael Specht’s blog article about a psychologist’s study into happy countries shows that most twitter users do not necessarily come from the world’s happiest countries.

The Twitterment scholars this month published a paper in which they researched Twitter’s socio usage academically. It is entitled ‘Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities’ and the issues covered are topological and geographical properties of Twitter’s social network. The researchers’ findings are quite straightforward; people use microblogging to talk about their daily activities and to seek or share information. The researchers also analyze user intentions associated at community level. Their sociograms show how users with similar intentions connect with each other.

We have invited Akshay Java, one of the scholars, for an interview on Twitter. We’ll ask him what he thinks about our project.