PDF 2008 - Mathew Hurst
Mathew Hurst from Microsoft Live Labs (the developer of BLEWS) was next up in the morning session with a presentation titled ‘When Worlds Collide: Social Media, Mainstream Media and Politics’.
I’ve followed Mathew’s Blogging at Data Mining: Text Mining, Data Visualisation and Social Media for a while now so I was quite keen to see him in person. I’m pleased to say that his presentation was just as engaging as his blogging.
Mathew kicked off with some basic blogosphere network modelling in the same vein as the Linkfluence presentation, but taking the scope of the network out to both the technology and politics blogospheres:
In the graph above, it can be seen that the technology blogosphere (the top left cluster) is fairly heavily integrated with the political blogosphere. Mathew also ran a program that modelled how technology posts spread through both the technology and the politics spheres, while political posts were less likely to do so. This wasn’t particularly surprising to me; given that the majority of participants in the political blogosphere are still tech geeks (or at least more interested in technology than the average punter) it was hardly surprising that tech issues would have universal appeal in the blogosphere.
A more interesting aspect of the presentation was Mathew’s demonstration about the volume of data you could mine about a single post. Post time, content, geographic location, blogger profiles and blogger histories (ie their posting history in terms of time, location, content etc) are all easily collected and coded by automated web crawlers. Once collected, this data can be fed into a range of applications and models to predict the proliferation of a post on a particular blog at a particular time on a particular issue as well as to analyse issue salience and blogger influence in real time.
A data rich and stimulating presentation.
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