Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Donald Trump rip-roars his way through social media, keeping Hillary Clinton’s Campaign in a tight spot. An average official Trump Facebook page [1] post published after August 1st 2015, when the primary campaigning began, attracts on average a staggering 72,058 likes. An…
I dipped the R cup in the Twitter font of wisdom and here is what I found… For the period April 15-July 16 Trump’s campaign leads Hillary Clintons’ on Twitter by a factor of about 2. Trump’s campaign put out a couple…
The issue if and how much is Trump’s celebrity influenced by a so-called “media obsession” with his persona and ideas has been much discussed during the 2016 nomination campaign. Here are some opinions… The Media’s Not Being Honest About Its Trump Obsession…
What qualifies as a mass communication theory? Typically, the phrase is connected with the idea of “media effects.” Mass communication theories are typically imagined as ways to explain how mass communication affects us. How does mass communication influence our political or shopping choices, how…
Purdue University Fall 2017 Meeting time: Tuesday – Thursday, 12 – 1:20 PM, BRNG 2275 Office hours: BRNG 2140, 2:15 – 4 PM T-Th and by appointment Instructor: Sorin Adam Matei, smatei at purdue edu According to the site Alexa.com, which tracks…
Most important highlights of the latest Pew Internet Study – 18-24 year olds compared to 30 year olds are almost twice as likely to have smartphones 20% less likely to read newspapers 100% more likely to use Twitter Younger Americans’ Reading Habits…
A sea debris field at 5°39’08.0″N 98°50’38.0″E north of the tiny granite outcropping Pulau Perak is being examined on the crowdsourced site TomNod as a potential location for the crash of lost flight MH370. The debris field was reported by a Twitter…
A new concept, practice capital, which extends the concept of social capital to collaborative projects is proposed in my chapter to the upcoming volume on the research significance of the C-Span Video Archive. I should mention that the archive is hosted in…
Crowdsourcing and social media trust emerged to be the most Twitter-discussed topics related to the second Kredible Net workshop on Trust, Authority, and Credibility in social media, which I co-organized at Stanford University. A NodeXL analysis also suggests that the conversation was carried…
Entropy theory used to decipher complexity of animal communication…. Information Theory Reveals Size of Whale and Dolphin Communication Repertoires | MIT Technology Review.
The relative popularity of the contenders in the 2012 US Presidential campaign can be measured not only by traditional polling methods, but also by the buzz the contestants create online and in social media. One efficient tool is Google Trends, which indicates…
Note: This post and the charts will be updated throughout the evening. Come back often for more recent details. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were relatively close in number of Google News searches, which is an indicator of social reach on online…
It’s official: The National Science Foundation hereby awards a grant of $179,594 to Purdue University for support of the project “KredibleNet – Building a research community and proposing a research agenda for the study and modeling of reputation and authority across informal…
A wonderful list of Twitter Sentiment Analysis Tools collated by Twittersentiment.appspot.com… Twitter Analysis Tools look at the meaning of the tweets and divides them into negative and positive communication items. Since the original list missed some sites, feel free to add yours…
Mashable hints that Twitter might have caught a whiff of Santorum’s possible dash in the last straight line before the finish in the Iowa caucus. There is something to say about it. Romney lost the lead not only on Twitter but also in…
Description The course is a guide to the emerging field of educational and scholarly theories and practices that use networked computational resources and platforms to promote learning and research. It will investigate how technologies and the practices associated with them might generate…
ESRI has published a very nice map that shows Irene’s impact as captured in Flickr photos, Youtube clips, and tweets. If you get over the clutter at lower levels of resolution, it looks like a very nice idea. For some years ESRI…
Since the beginning of the libyan rebellion, the foreign press has been forced to stay at the Rixos hotel, in Tripoli, not far away from Gaddafi’s residence and headquarters, at Bab al Aziza (See map below for details). Until recently, the hotel…
Iceland surprised the world when it announced that it will include in the draft of its new constitution suggestions made by the citizenry via social media. A website and a special Facebook page were used as main means for collecting public input. The…
QR codes, which are a type of barcodes that can call up multimedia on cell phones (see Around the World in 80 Days example to the right), are now embraced by the art world. The MOMA art exhibit ““Talk to Me: Design…
Google+ is the search giant’s response to Facebook’s recent raise as the most visited site in the world. The tools aim to make the web experience of Google account users a little bit more like that offered by Facebook. The problem is,…
After a great start, with great positive reactions on Twitter, President Obama’s Middle East speech has become only a few days later a more controversial proposition, both for social media audiences and for newsmakers. According to Social Mention, a social media monitoring…
NEW: Read latest update on social mention sentiment analysis of President Obama’s Middle East speech Textual analysis of the rhetoric and of the social media buzz created by President Obama’s speech on the future of the Middle East (see transcript of Middle…
Little did @stefmara Twitter user and Neil Monday know that their pictures and videos of the space shuttle Discovery launch from Kennedy Space center, which they captured on their Iphones while flying from Orlando, will make world wide news. Here it’s one…
All your digital breadcrumbs in one place… A program aggregates all your location based information and plots it on a map. A new software tool created by Greek programmer Yiannis Kakavas goes much farther in the shock category. Called “Creepy,” Kakavas’ tool…
Ali Wylam, one of the students enrolled in my Com 435 class (Emerging Communication Technologies) found that teen sensation Justin Bieber has a gigantic stature in cyberspace. He is right up there with the big corporations. He garnered over 30 million monthly…
Facebook does not seem to have a very large advertising footprint. In fact, it relies in great measure on two major partners, Zynga, the producer of Farmville, and Groupon. Gaming and group buying partners are responsible for 2/3rds of Facebook’s revenue. While…
Image via Wikipedia Spot on. Leveraging the power of social media resides in our ability to check and funnel its output, not in hosing out content indiscriminately. In this respect Assange, who has decided to throttle the release of his stash of…
Image via CrunchBase Sept 23, 4 PM, EST: Facebook appears to be down. I have tried to access it several times in the last hour and it is beyond reach. The current message is that not even the DNS request can be…
A very interesting paper on calculating critical mass and predicting explosion of interaction on social media sites. Image via Wikipedia Disagreement surrounds a formal definition of ‘critical mass’ and of the economic willingness to pay for membership in a social network. Our…
Marc Smith, cofounder of ConnectedAction and a former Microsoft Research employee, and a group of academics including Ben Shneiderman and Cody Dune have developed a strong competitor to UCINET, the workhorse of social network analysis. The tool rides on top of Excel…
Gang Signs on the Web creative commons image by JL! via Flickr Gang members use social media to organize payback missions or to snuff out snitches. A Washington Post article cited by Gawker and dugg 172 times reports that gangs regularly use…
Twitter says that the content (tweets) belong to you, while the service reserves the right to distribute it freely, including via API applications. Twitter Support :: The Twitter Rules The Twitter Rules Our goal is to provide a service that allows you…
So, what constitutes spamming on Twitter? Here is what Twitter posted on its corporate blog recently regarding the Twitter updated terms of service:
A dorky looking Steve Irwin, Matthew Hurst, of Microsoft Labs, intimates that the Blogosphere is on the wane. I picked this up from L Rainie’s Twitter feed. Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media: Is Authority Migrating? There’s an interesting discussion…
Twisten.fm….a new mashup between Twitter and music service Grooveshark is just one more way to “fall in love” with web 2.0. As if Twitter needed another way to show-off it’s coolness.
@comanescu that’s what I was saying, as well…
@jdickerson entropy? as in it will all end up the way the time machine described it?
@jdickerson hold on, jessica alba hasn’t yet, if that is any consolation…
@hrheingold freud’s nephew invented PR? that’s too good to be true….
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Submitted by "Adrienne Hall" on October 22, 2008 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2008, Purdue University, Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog. Abstract This essay attempts to begin explaining how participation in online social interactions impacts…