Information spreading in FriendFeed

SIGSNA:Special Interest Group on Social Network Analysis
Luca Rossi - Fabio GigliettoUniversityof Urbino “Carlo BO”

Background:Growing availability of User Generated Content
persistence/easy to search/scalability/ easy to replicate/(boyd 2007)
High research value of spontaneously produced contents.

The Big (online) Data: New opportunities
high value of UGCs
huge amount of spontaneous data
large variety of topics
worldwide phenomenon (comparative analysis)

The Big Data: New methodological problems
getting the data- storing the data - querying the data
analysing the data
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Interdisciplinaryapproach
©Flickr.com / SouthsideImages

Getting the data:
RSS feeds (content produced) or API (users info).
Last.FM, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Netlog, YouTube, MySpace…
Contacts, status, profile, TopUsed…
©Flickr.com / GeekMom Heather

- Legal/ethical issues
- Terms of use
©Flickr.com / GeekMom Heather

Storing the data:
SIGSNA (two weeks of FriendFeed public data)≃10.500.000 posts (2GB text data). ≃ 500.000 likes. ≃ 450.000 users. ≃ 15 million subscriptions.
©Flickr.com / amanderson2

from WOW20 to SIGSNA:Workingwith online usergeneratedcontentforSociologicalResearch

Summary:

data cleaning

examples:
≠
Heidi: 1973 Top Model
Heidi: 1974 Anime based on JohannaSpyri’snovel.

Querying the data
Case study: SIGSNA research on breaking news propagation on Friendfeed
Mike Bongiorno (famousItalian TV host) died on Sept. 8 2010. The news stroke Friendfeed at 01.57 PM:- First entry >130 comments
- Allentries > 585 comments

How news propagate?What kind of behaviours?

Using timestamps and network of followers we have been able to track the propagation paths identifying major hubs.

Short propagationchains
Long propagationchains
No propagation

Explicit news sharing is followed by chatting and discussion. This kind of activity contribute to news propagation
“
Bye Mike! We’re missingyou!Bye granpa Mike!
Mike, you’ve been a milestoneofour TV
”

First entry has the highest informative function
Most commented entry is a long and articulated discussion

More info, papers and data:
http://larica.uniurb.it/sigsna
SIGSNA is a joint research project with the department of Computer Science of the University of Bologna (Dr. MatteoMagnani) and it is partially founded by Telecom Italia.

Information spreading in FriendFeed

by Luca Rossi on Jul 07, 2010

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