Fuck: What have you got to swear about?

The words people combined with 'fuck' last Wednesday on Twitter (i.e., before the world went you-know-who crazy):
I may get this printed as a prompt card for when I get myself into arguments and my middle class background fails to provide me with the required lingo. Just take a selection of words, mix them up, and you're "shit hot like fuckin transformers".

[nb. This is absolutely the last Wordle].

Twittering Jackson

As a follow-up to the last post it seemed appropriate to show what people were actually saying about Michael Jackson. A Wordle of the Twitter comments on Friday 26th June mentioning 'Jackson':

Personally I thought there would have been a few more negative comments, but seemingly most people really don't speak ill of the dead.

That's it...I promise no more Michael Jackson Wordles...although I may be tempted to post some other Wordles from my Twitter corpus.

[N.B. The words 'Michael' and 'Jackson' were removed from the Wordle as they far outweighed all the others.]

Seven Twitter Wordles: #MJ's Death was massive!

Despite a few problems with my programming, I finally got a random sample of the Twitter public timeline: the top 20 feeds from the Twitter public timeline were collected every 30 seconds over seven days. The Twitter updates were then put in Wordle (with the 'common English words' taken out).

Even mundane wordles can be interesting to look at. Over the week you can see just how small the trend words are in comparison to the mundanities of life. Then Michael Jackson died.

[you can click on pictures to enlarge]

Tuesday


Wednesday


Thursday


Friday


Saturday


Sunday


Monday
The Twitter community soon get back on an even keel.

Personally I'm always surprised how little people swear on Twitter.

Traffic to the University of Wolverhampton's Web Site has Collapsed!

I've just noticed an interesting trend over at Google Trends, and it's confirmed by both Compete and Alexa. The traffic to the University of Wolverhampton web site has collapsed.

Google Trends:

Alexa:

Compete:

There are lots of potential reasons for the decline in the traffic: obviously changes in student behaviour (e.g., Google Scholar rather than the OPAC), increasing number of satellite web sites (e.g., individual/departmental blogs). But does this really account for such a massive decline? A brief glance at some other university web sites showed some decline in traffic, but I didn't notice them falling as sharply.

Whilst I'd suggest the university have a good dig around in their data to find out exactly what is going on, as much as anything it highlights the need for a change in how we think of a successful online web presence.

How much is a Twitter update worth?

A couple of days ago I posted my thousandth Twitter update, and an earth shattering post it was to:

A comment appropriately enough about Twitter, an update that was meaningless to anyone who wasn't already aware of Opera Unite, and representative of the banality of so many of my Twitter comments.

As I discussed when I passed my 100th Twitter comment, the value of Twitter is hard to quantify, especially in monetary terms. Throughout social media, the value of the content we generate is generally indirect rather than direct: Dave Winer has made over $2 million via the stuff he talks about on his blog, whilst I have made $32.02 through the Google Adwords on this blog.

Nonetheless the dream of direct income remains. On the same day as I posted my 1,000th update, I received an email asking me to review the TwitPub marketplace. Basically TwitPub allows you to create a Twitter stream that people pay to get Direct Messages from. Whilst the concept is interesting, the content offered is generally poor. The only feed I came across which had any subscribers (supposedly '2') was a feed for real time trading alerts (at $0.99 a month), and the author's web site link was to a page of adverts.


Twitter works because you follow many people, no single person is indispensable. If you want to get useful trading information you would do better follow numerous people in the field and drawing your own conclusions rather than paying $0.99 for the opinions of one person, however good they are.

So who could make use of TwitPub? Those who already have a loyal fan-base. It provides a simple means of monetising an existing brand. But when everyone else is offering their Twitter streams for free, I don't imagine most fans being loyal for long.

Twitter, like other social media, is most likely to generate income indirectly. For me that has been £100 to write an opinion piece on Twitter in a magazine (JISC Inform 25 - see page 20). I doubt my Twitter-stream would ever generate that sort of income through TwitPub.

Did Opera Reinvent the Web?

Last week Opera promised that today it was going to "reinvent the web". Today it launched Opera Unite, a new technology that turns your web browser into a server. This basically means that when I am online, and have Opera Unite enabled in my Opera browser you can access certain of my files as though they were on a web server!

At the moment there are only a few Opera Unite services:

Whether Opera Unite truly manages to reinvent the web will depend on the sort of services other people build. At the moment the services have a distinct web 1.0 feel, with messageboards, chatrooms, and static html pages ['Device Unavailable' means I'm not currently using Opera Unite]. However, If the chatroom becomes a social networking site, the message board a distributed micro-blogging service, and the static html becomes dynamicly generated pages built on the back of python and PHP, then we really will be heralding a new era of the web.

Brief Thoughts on Twitter and the Turing Test

Before heading off the allotment to pull weeds this morning I downloaded some podcasts from a Berkeley course on Foundations of American Cyber-Culture. One of the things discussed was the Turing test [summary by Saygin]:

The interrogator is connected to one person and one machine via a terminal, therefore can't see her counterparts. Her task is to find out which of the two candidates is the machine, and which is the human only by asking them questions. If the machine can "fool" the interrogator, it is intelligent.

Whilst I don't generally give a lot of thought to the Turing test, the idea of creating an automatic Twitter account in an attempt to pass the test was immediately appealing:
- Twitter offers a massive/current conversational database to draw on.
- The 140 character limit means people are more likely to be forgiving of answers that are not totally explicit.
- The API means that programming knowledge required to create such a bot (albeit not necessarily a good one) would be relatively simple.

I was not surprised to find therefore, that other people have had the same idea. However, how much of the human created Twitter data could the bot use and still be considered a bot? If the bot merely relayed the questions asked of it to someone else, and responded with their answer it would be considered cheating, but if it just found the answer of someone else who had answered a similar question would it be acceptable?

There are just not enough hours in the day to do all the things I want to in this always-on world.