How is it that certain topics manage to get more attention than others, thus “bubbling to the top” and changing the agenda of an online community?
Today, Dr. Bernardo A. Huberman, the director of HP Labs’ Social Computing Lab, released research on the nature of user influence on social media networks such as Twitter. After analyzing 22 million tweets, Dr. Huberman and his co-authors calculated a novel measure of influence for individual users and developed a corresponding algorithm that automatically identifies particularly influential users.
Research, research, research. You can’t get enough of it. OK, well, maybe you can, but this is important research. It does tell us things we already know, that popularity is not necessarily influence, but when someone’s analysed 22 million tweets rather than speaking from experience or gut feeling, you should listen to what they have to say.
Unless otherwise stated, everything Brendan says on this site is his own opinion. So there.
