Dr. V

Reading notes: Twitterville

Twitterville is a collection of stories about Twitter written by a twetizen who is enchanted with the Twitter village. It is a business book as much as it is a piece of
anthropology – by reading stories about a place, we infer its values, social norms, and culture.

Most of the stories are wonderful, uplifting, and show the positive side of Twitter. They are not, I think, your everyday Twitter stories – they are the extraordinary events that stand out in a place’s history. I’m glad someone took the time to document and save them. I remember living through most of them, and it felt great to read these accounts of recent Twitter history. Israel is an excellent story teller, and if I didn’t envy his warm, fluid, friendly, yet clear and simple writing style so much, I’d go on and on praising it :).

I loved reading the book, and enjoyed every page of it. I can imagine critics complaining that the book is overly positive – that it portrays Twitterville as a better place than (they think) it is. Israel’s Twitter enchantment doesn’t bother me, primarily because, like a respectable ethnographer, he spells out his biases clearly and repeatedly. He explains his point of view and enables the reader to decide how to interpret the content. As a qualitative researcher, I do not believe in the myth of objectivity. I think the best we can do is explain our biases, so readers can make informed decisions about interpreting our writing. I see very little of this in popular literature, and I hope more authors will adopt this practice.

… and Israel’s enchantment with Twitter doesn’t bother me, because I can relate to it and I share his point of view. I was initially amused by the claim that Twitter can lead to… world peace. But as I read the last chapter, I realized that, as a firm believer in the power of communication to make and break our world, I too, think, that conversation is the best solution – and that it can, indeed, help us make peace.

In the news

2010

Mar. 26 – Social hours – Greater Fort Wayne Business Weekly article about using social media at work

2009

Oct. 7 – Twitter tool could help educators, e-campus news

Oct. 6 – Quoted in the Journal & Courier about a new Twitter tool, need4feed.

Aug. 9 – Newspaper article published in The Spartanburg Herald Journal (South Carolina) about some of my Facebook research.

Mar. 8 – Politicians are a-Twitter over the new social media, The Spartanburg Herald Journal, S.C.

How to be a successful grad. student

I asked my TECH621 students to interview 3 professors each and get tips about graduate school success.

Here are their posts: Scott S., Stephen W., Jenny S., Zheng Z., Andrew B., Scott K.

A bit late, here are my tips & expectations about being a successful graduate student. They are derived from my experience in grad. school, both as a student and professor:

Be self-motivated

You don’t have to be in grad school. Your parents may have forced you to get an undergrad degree, but you are in grad school because you want to learn. So, learn.

A successful graduate student doesn’t only “absorb” information. She actively seeks knowledge.

Professors might mention something in passing, and the grad. student goes out to research that topic in depth and learn about it, because he wants to, because he’s curious – because he’s a born researcher (you know who’s a born researcher? Don Bulmer. He has an innate curiosity and the drive to pursue knowledge. Those are characteristics of the ideal grad. student.)

Actually, several other tips follow from the first one:

work hard. As a grad student, I put at least 4 hours of reading & other work preparing for each 3 hour class I took.
be conscientious. Grad students don’t miss assignments, don’t turn them in late. They don’t miss class (there was never an attendance policy in my grad. classes, but I didn’t even dream of missing class unless I was very sick).
be critical. Try to view different points of view. Question. Explore. Ask:
- “why?”
- “does it have to be so?”
- “what/who are we leaving out?”
- “what’s the downside of that?”
- “what are the long-term effects?”
create knowledge. Most grad. students learn to be researchers. Assume your researcher role and if there’s no easy answer to a question, go ahead and research it – create new knowledge.

Try to learn the culture of academia & to fit in

You can’t succeed in academia without doing good work. But you can do good work and not succeed in academia, because you don’t understand how to present your work in ways that are valued by academic culture. The values vary by field and even by department, but be on the lookout, try to identify and learn things such as:

the accepted/valued outlets for presenting research (posters, conference papers, or panels, and at what conferences?)
the accepted/value format and writing style
and even… the accepted/valued topics. There are certain “hot topics” at any given time, just as there are certain “passe topics.”

A mentor can help you figure these things out – but it doesn’t have to be your academic adviser. Ask faculty members, we love to give advice. You learn a lot just by hanging out with faculty or senior grad students. Create these opportunities. Organize a seminar or a get-together, or ask if you can go to lunch with someone.

Think long-term

Every class you take is a potential job interview. I’ve had several professors approach me and offer me teaching or research assistantships while I was taking their course, or as soon as the course was over. In fact, many classes ARE job interviews.

Maybe today’s class or assignment is boring, or seems irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. Try to do your best anyway. Keep in mind that 2 or 4 years down the road, you might need to ask that professor for a recommendation letter. The best thing we can write about a student is that she consistently exceeded expectations. Great work is great. Doing great work consistently and repeatedly is even greater.

As always, please add your tips, comments, reactions, comments or… cabbage jokes 😉

How I read a book in 2 hours

I promised this post to my students. This is how it works for me:

Preparation:

quiet time, free of distractions and noises (TV, music with words)
clear, rested, focused mind (coffee or tea help, or read in the morning)
upright body posture to maintain alertness: sit at table, not lounge chair or bed. Look down at book.
keep large notebook & pen on hand (for outlining main argument and/or book’s structure)

Clear goals in mind:

to understand what the book is about (TOPIC)
to understand the MAIN ARGUMENT of the book
to understand what types of SUPPORTING EVIDENCE the author uses to support the main argument

My strategy: get the big picture of the book by understanding its structure (outline).

I read word for word, in this order:

inside flap – b/c it’s usually a concise summary of the book
.
back cover – the praise for the book tells me in which contexts the book has been found useful (i.e. education, or marketing, or economics). This helps me place the book in context. (oh, this is useful for marketing professionals).
.
table of contents – I spend a lot of time with the table of contents, because it tells me what the outline/structure of the book is. If the chapter titles as smarty-pants instead of descriptive (boo!) I flip through the book to see what the author means by a certain smarty-pants chapter title. Here, I make my selections of chapters I might be more interested in than others.
.
Preface, Introduction, first chapter – the Introduction especially gives me 80% of what I need to know: the problem addressed in the book, the book’s main claim (thesis statement) and an overview of the contents of the book. I ask myself: if this book could be summarized in ONE sentence, what would this sentence be? I hunt for this sentence and underline it boldly when I find it (sometimes I find 2 or 3, but not more – you have to be very picky here).

For example, I think this is that ONE sentence from Content Nation, found in Ch. 1, p. 2:

“In the process of becoming publishers who can reach and interact with a potentially global audience whenever they need to or want to, something is changing in the way that everyday people look at themselves and their world. […] We are beginning to look upon institutions that we used to rely on for providing us with cohesion and value in our lives as less valuable in the face of publishing technologies that allow us to organize ourselves and our lives more to our suiting.“

This is, I believe, the thesis statement of the book. It tells me what to look for from now on:

I know the book is about self-publishing – I will look for definitions and explanations of self-publishing (TOPIC)
.
I know the book is about change brought about by self publishing – I will look for an argument about the nature and the dynamic of that change (MAIN ARGUMENT)
.
I know the book will talk about change in specific contexts or institutions – these will be examples, EVIDENCE that SUPPORTS the main argument

Once I identified the 3 main ingredients of the book, I go looking for them in the other chapters. I will read carefully (if I have time) the parts that inform the 3 main ingredients above (topic, main argument, supporting evidence). But, to get an idea of the entire book, I read:

the first paragraph of each chapter – it is usually the thesis statement of that chapter. If it’s not the first paragraph (boo!) then I look for it further down the page.
.
the first sentence of each paragraph (GRE tip, remember?). If the book is well written in the U.S. writing style, the first sentence of each paragraph is the paragraph’s main idea. In European writing style, it’s more complicated. It may be the last sentence.
.
headings and subheadings (love them!), and the first sentence/para under each of them
.
the last paragraph of each chapter, because it should be a summary/conclusion of that paragraph
.
the Conclusion chapter (last chapter) because it should contain a summary of the book, some context for the book, and takeaways.

Try it out. Share tips that have worked for you. And most importantly ask yourself:

Do I write such that people can quickly grasp the meaning of my text?

[update/one more thought:] – ultimately, no matter what you do, make sure you get a few specific ideas out of your reading. If, after spending time with a reading, all you have in your head is an amorphous blur and no specific ideas, then you know you’re doing something wrong.

Brizzly: making Twitter more like Facebook

I’ve been playing around with Brizzly this morning, and here are some initial thoughts. My default Twitter app is Tweetdeck, so I’m comparing to that.

for most part, it works as advertised in the demo, except it’s a bit slow sometimes, and when I tried to save a search, it experienced an error (but it’s a private beta, I can live with that)
I like that I can see photos and videos on screen, and don’t have to click links to view them.
I like the option to store groups on the side column, because I hate lateral scrolling in Tweetdeck. With Brizzly, I can see myself creating more groups.
How about mobile? I haven’t found a corresponding iPhone app, so if only for this feature alone, I’ll stick with Tweetdeck.
Auto-refresh is spotty, at best. I still haven’t figured out if or how it works. Sometimes I see a message to refresh the page, or a bubble next to a Group, sometimes I don’t – but I refresh the page and see there are new updates anyway.

But here’s the major change that Brizzly introduces, and for me, a concern:

The user experience is a bit more like Facebook, but that can be very misleading. See the screenshot below:

My reply with a comment about the cat shows up (for me, in Brizzly) – right under the photo. So the context of my comment is very clear to me. However, for the recipient, if she uses another Twitter app, my reply will show as a usual @ tweet in her stream.

The problem is that for me, the context is very clear, but for her, it may be confusing. If I reply “awww…. !” she has to put 2+2 together to figure what my tweet is about. I usually try to include context in my tweets – I’d usually reply “awww… cute cat!” – so she knows that the tweet is about. I try to avoid using “this” and “that” in tweets and instead specify what I’m referring to.

I posted a photo, and people’s comments didn’t show under the photo, like in Twitpic, but just as replies in my twitter stream – so no context there for me on the receiving side.

It’s confusing to have context for some people, in some instances, but not for others. If some people use Brizzly and others don’t, I can see a lot of misscommunication happening on Twitter.

Although Brizzly might enhance MY Twitter experience, the confusion about context might reduce the overall community experience.

Watch the Brizzly demo:

Research Study: @sockington is more influential than @chrisbrogan

This Webecology research report has been making the rounds on Twitter. I haven’t had time to read it until now, here are my reading notes:

The Webecology team uses large scale data mining to identify patterns indicative of online culture and community. Wish I’d do this, too – and will, as soon as I find a research partner to help with the data mining part.

For this project, the authors set out to create a more accurate measure of influence on Twitter that goes beyond either:

number of followers; or
followers/friends ratio

The authors defined influence on Twitter as:

influence on Twitter = the potential of an action of a user to initiate a further action by another user

Specifically, influence means the potential of a tweet to generate replies, mentions (conversational behaviors), RTs, and attributions (content-pushing behaviors).

This is an atheoretical, operational definition of influence (the study’s Achille’s heel).

As far as I understand, all 4 actions were weighed equally. So, a RT factors the same as an @reply in determining influence.

They selected 12 Twitter accounts to study. The selection was based on this criterion: the 12 accounts were “widely perceived to be among the more influential users on Twitter.” It is not clear who did the perceiving, and what definition or measure of influence they used in the process of perception. IMO, the arbitrary selection of the sample is another major weakness – but in this case, I can live with it, because the purpose is not to derive conclusions about Twitter culture as much as it is to demonstrate how the methodology can be used.

Then, the 12 users were grouped into 3 categories. Here is a table with the accounts they analyzed, and their number of tweets over 10 days, as well as the number of followers and friends at the end of the 10 days:

—

Celebrities	Username	Tweets	Followers	Followees

Ashton Kutcher	aplusk	3,205	3,407,385	209
Shaquille O’Neil	THE_REAL_SHAQ	2,072	2,092,541	562
Stanley Kirk Burrell	MCHammer	6,016	1,331,797	31,202
Sockington	sockington	5,711	1,089,984	380
Justine Ezarik	ijustine	7,718	605,441	3,039

News Outlets	Username	Tweets	Followers	Followees

CNN Breaking News	cnnbrk	1,096	2,712,530	18
BarackObama.com	BarackObama	330	2,018,016	761,851
Mashable.com	mashable	17,914	1,363,510	1,925
CNN	cnn	11,607	193,625	50

Social Media Analysts	Username	Tweets	Followers	Followees

Gary Vaynerchuk	garyvee	7,532	862,790	9,683
Chris Brogan	chrisbrogan	48,341	94,715	88,431
Robert Scoble	Scobleizer	23,112	94,295	2,423

The data that they mined was as collected over 10 days, in August 2009. The data included:

The 2143 tweets generated by the 12 users
The 90,130 actions (responses, RTs) triggered by the original 2143 tweets
All the tweets generated in connection with the 12 users (by their followers and friends;a total of 134, 654 tweets, 15,866,629 followers, and 899,773 friends/followees)

The authors produced 2 types of influence reports, based on the type of action that was triggered:

conversational action (people replied, or mentioned the user – e.g. “meeting @stockington for catnip”)
content-pushing action (people retweeted, or gave attribution – e.g. “via@username”)

Please note that a mention may or may not be a response to a tweet. If they were not responses to a tweet, they fall outside the authors’ definition of Twitter influence, and they should have been excluded from the analysis.

Here we go, on to the findings:

Conversational action

This graph shows you the amount of conversational activity (@replies and mentions) each user got in response to one (average) tweet.

Content action

This graph shows you how much content action (retweets and attributions) each user got for each (average) tweet:

So here we see that, per tweet, @sockington did get more retweets than @chrisbrogan.

The authors claim that these graphs of influence/tweet are the most accurate measure of Twitter influence so far. Therefore:

@sockington IS more influential on Twitter than @chrisbrogan,

because the fake cat gets more retweets. (sorry, @sockington, I do love you!!!)

I know exactly what you’re thinking, it starts with B and ends with T.

That’s because here we have a problem of construct validity. The measures do not actually measure influence. I wish the authors had read some research in communication & persuasion about the concept of influence, then worked their way from a conceptual to an operational definition.

Obviously, @sockington gets more retweets because he’s cuter & funnier than @chrisbrogan (sorry, Chris!). We don’t know why people reply or retweet. This study ignores a very important aspect of human relations: meaning. There is meaning in tweets, and meaning in why people retweet. But that is not captured in this study.

That being said, the report shows what can be done with data mining – it’s awesome! With a bit of help from people who know how to study meaning (hint, hint!), this type of research will be extremely valuable.

If anything, let this be an argument for computers & communication people working together, across disciplines.

In a future post, I will review conceptual and operational definitions of influence.

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Be self-motivated

Try to learn the culture of academia & to fit in

Think long-term

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Preparation:

Clear goals in mind:

I read word for word, in this order:

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Conversational action

Content action

@sockington IS more influential on Twitter than @chrisbrogan,

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