I Shot the Cyborg

Patronus Analytical, a blog covering security issues facing NGOs and other humanitarian organizations operating in dangerous environments, has used Google Trends to compare interest in Darfur, Afghanistan, Beer, and Breakfast. The results are interesting, sad, and all-too-predictable. Of course, in my previous post comparing Iraq, economy, health care, and taxes, I used BlogPulse and IceRocket. Looks I will have to add Google Trends to the buzz tracking toolbox. One of Patronus Analytical’s charts is pasted after the jump.

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(co)production, scholarship2.0, social science

Above are a couple of charts I just created, on the fly as it were, which track the relative blogosphere buzz for four topics of concern in the upcoming election. Data from both IceRocket and BlogPulse indicate that the economy has overtaken Iraq as a topic of concern, with the buzz lines for the two crossing on or about January 14 of this year. At about the same time, taxes overtook health care. These two sites raise interesting possibilities for informally tracking buzz on particular issues.

To quickly save and then blog these graphs, I used a Flickr bookmarklet that allows me to send the images of the charts created by IceRocket and BlogPulse directly to my Flickr account, from which I can blog them. Also, I figured out how to “hack” the URLs to add more search terms over a greater period of time. The two services limit you to 3 simultaneous searches, with BlogPulse allowing up to a 6 month time-span and IceRocket a 3 month time-span. However, if you modify the URL manually, you can add as many searches as you like, as well as set the time-span to whatever you like. So, the examples above each track 4 issues over 6 months.

[Cross-posted here.]

–Sean

Technorati Tags: buzz, buzz tracking, icerocket, blogpulse, politics, election

scholarship2.0, social science

From Fast Company:

Is the Tipping Point Toast?

Don’t get Duncan Watts started on the Hush Puppies. “Oh, God,” he groans when the subject comes up. “Not them.” The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994–until a few New York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids copied them, and so on, until, voilà! Within two years, sales of Hush Puppies had exploded by a stunning 5,000%, without a penny spent on advertising. All because, as Gladwell puts it, a tiny number of superinfluential types (”Twenty? Fifty? One hundred–at the most?”) began wearing the shoes.

These tastemakers, Gladwell concluded, are the spark behind any
successful trend. “What we are really saying,” he writes, “is that in a
given process or system, some people matter more than others.” In
modern marketing, this idea–that a tiny cadre of connected people
triggers trends–is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of
viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful
folks, and you’ll reach everyone else through them, basically for free.
Loosely, this is referred to as the Influentials theory, and while it
has been a marketing touchstone for 50 years, it has recently reentered
the mainstream imagination via thousands of marketing studies and a
host of best-selling books. In addition to The Tipping Point, there was The Influentials,
by marketing gurus Ed Keller and Jon Berry, as well as the gospel
according to PR firms such as Burson-Marsteller, which claims
“E-Fluentials” can “make or break a brand.” According to MarketingVOX,
an online marketing news journal, more than $1 billion is spent a year
on word-of-mouth campaigns targeting Influentials, an amount growing at
36% a year, faster than any other part of marketing and advertising.
That’s on top of billions more in PR and ads leveled at the cognoscenti.

Yet, if you believe Watts, all that money and effort is being
wasted. Because according to him, Influentials have no such effect.
Indeed, they have no special role in trends at all.

In the past few years, Watts–a network-theory scientist who
recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working
for Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) –has performed a series of controversial,
barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He
has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are
not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of
rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a
well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts
demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might
be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials,
he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.  (much more…)

Technorati Tags: tipping point, viral marketing, marketing, social networking

social science

p.s. Rumor has it that Mark passed his exams… w00t

Humor, social science consumerism, cyber monday, iPhone, will it blend

So Ted Castronova gave a talk at Georgetown a few days back. The PEW Internet and American Life Project had some interesting things to say about it. The statistical trends in their research point to a marked increase in use of technology to communicate, even among communities that would just as easily communicate face to face or by phone. The end of interpersonal communication? They also released some other interesting data. God I love that group. They make all their raw data available too. What a resource.

Hector-

social science, videogames

One of scratch your head moments in my videogame theory class is when I go over demographics with my students. Yes, videogame demographics are sketchy, at best, as most of the studies are sponsored by very interested parties, but they still have use.

The big, no way, moment, aside from age, comes when we discuss gender. Students have a hard time accepting the 40% women gamer number, initially. Once they stop thinking of Halo or Madden and expand their definition of videogames to include online card games, casual games clarity sets in and the world is fine with female gamers.

So imagine my shock at the headline, “Men also avid players of casual video games: study shows.” While I knew women were well represented in casual games (think of Zuma as an exemplar), I had no idea that folks thought men were adverse to them. According to the article, “The reason men have not been reflected in the data so far is because most males are fans of realistic ‘hardcore’ games and many do not admit they like to play simpler games involving shiny gems or lines of colored balls.”

Wow, I had no idea my masculinity was in question because I enjoy a rousing game of Diner Dash (ok, bad example), but I am relieved to have it restored by this study which shows that women may purchase 3/4 of all casual games, but the play of them is evenly split 50/50 between the sexes.

So guys, no longer need you be ashamed of those casual games on your Xbox Live gamertag, you may wear ‘em proud, thanks to social science! And ladies, you apparently never needed to be embarrassed for playing Tetris Splash, so carry on!

[More: Reuters, Casual Game Association]

casual games, demographics, gender, social science, videogames casual games, demographics, gender, videogames