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Why Some Twitter Posts Catch On, and Some Don't

At New York Times:

AMID the talk last week of a Facebook revolution across the Middle East, Americans and other English speakers took to Twitter — to post about their love lives.

Hashtags — the community-driven shorthand used to identify conversation themes — like “icantdateyou” and “worstpickuplines” were vastly more popular a few days ago than ones like “Egyptians” or “jan25,” a reference to Day 1 of the Egyptian protests. In just one hour last Tuesday, “icantdateyou” racked up nearly 274,000 mentions on Twitter, with posts like “icantdateyou if all you wanna do is fuss” and “icantdateyou if you look like your brother.”

Alas, poor “Mubarak” rated fewer than 11,000 during the same hour. (Many Egyptians could not post on Twitter because their government had temporarily cut off most Internet and cellphone service.)

Sure, many of us are more inclined to toss off frivolous posts than politically charged ones. But a new study of hashtags offers some insight into how and why some topics become popular quickly online while others don’t.

People generally pass on the latest conversational idioms — like “cantlivewithout” or “dontyouhate” — the first few times they see them on Twitter, or they never adopt them at all, according to the study by computer scientists. The researchers analyzed the 500 most popular hashtags among more than three billion messages posted on Twitter from August 2009 to January 2010.

“Idioms are like a sugar rush,” explains Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell and a co-author of the study. “You see it once, you either use it or you don’t, but the rush wears off.”

More contentious themes like politics take longer to catch on, the researchers found. People tend to wait until they have seen a more polarizing phrase — like “sarahpalin” or “hcr,” short for health care reform — four, five or six times on Twitter before posting it themselves.

We already know that people often influence one another’s behavior. That is the monkey-see-monkey-do premise behind advertising. And it may seem intuitive that different kinds of information spread differently on the Web.

More at the link.

Frankly, I haven't the slightest interest in those throwaway hashtags, and while I find it boring sometimes, there's still nothing like Twitter to get real-time information.

The Death of Blogging

I noticed the other day, with some interest, Chris Bowers' announcement that Open Left, the far-left progressive blog, was shutting down. I'd already noticed that Bowers had migrated to Daily Kos, and no explanation was needed: more readers, and more exposure. I didn't think too much of it beyond that. And then I read Ben Smith's post, where he wrote:

There's been a bit written recently on the death of blogs, and while there will -- I hope -- remain space for some, there's little doubt that the online world of politics is no longer limited to this form ... Some of the older blogs on right and left are still thriving, while others -- like TPM and the Hot Air bloggers -- have worked to turn themselves into broader news platforms. But the form now feels a little quaint.

So, the death of blogs. I hadn't actually seen too much on that. Or, mostly, what I have seen and written about is the fascination with new media, especially Facebook and Twitter. But I just found a report on the death of blogs at New York Observer, "The End of Blogging." Folks can read it at the link. All of this is mostly a matter of definition. Blogging per se isn't going anywhere. Twitter is micro blogging. It's the hippest medium right now, but it may well be replaced with some new application or publishing format soon enough. The larger issue is the future of news publishing altogether. Folks might check James Rainey's piece yesterday on the SoCal newspaper industry: "Consolidation seen as inevitable for Southern California's newspapers." The dead-tree news model is nearly a thing of the past. Consumers get their news online nowadays, and those formats best able to attract advertising revenue will keep publishing. My sense is that, yeah, reverse-chronology blogs are someone quaint, as Ben Smith notes, but the power of blogging remains as great as ever. Top bloggers breaking top stories will survive. And the numbers will include a lot more than those mentioned by Ben Smith, who, incidently, made his own "quaint" blogging comment on a blog. Perhaps folks will just shift over to the online newspaper format. Think Daily Caller or Huffington Post, or on a smaller platform, Maggie's Notebook, NewsReal, or PA Pundits – International. And then there's Althouse. She keeps plugging away on Blogger, and if it's good enough for her it's good enough for me! I'll be keeping American Power running, whether on Blogger or Wordpress, a switch that remains in the contemplation mode. I'm also in talks for my own blog at NewsReal, which means I might be joining the David Horowitz publishing house as a formal member. Again, that's just in the discussion phase, but I'll know more after CPAC next week, where I'll be hooking up with some folks.

Meanwhile, perhaps The Other McCain might weigh in on the topic.

And for a reminder on why I'll be blogging somewhere, no matter what, head back over to Open Left, where Daniel De Groot bids farewell with a parting attack on the right, "Farewell thought: Conservatism is still the enemy":

Shortly after Kerry's loss in 2004, at MyDD, Chris wrote "Conservatism is our enemy" which I think is the first time I ever encountered a direct ideological assault on conservatism itself. Along with Phil Agre's rightly famous essay on the subject, it began me on a road and mission to better understanding this beast. Everything I have learned to date from then continues to bolster Chris' original thesis. Conservativism is still the primary enemy of progress, justice, fairness and widespread happiness for humanity. It remains a destructive and corrosive force on the institutions of democracy and the single biggest obstacle to world peace ....

These fights will have to go on. Conservatism is a destructive system of hierarchy and zero-sum power seeking that has no place in the running of a modern society. It is some kind of evolutionary anachronism, the ingrained desire to accumulate power and resources to the exclusion of "the other" against times of need in Hobbes' jungle. Since about 1850 we (in the West at least) have lived in the world of surplus resources where there really is enough stuff for everyone to go around, but still we live with about half the population intuitively working the politics of a Malthusian state where every hamburger you eat is one of my kids going hungry. Even today in the shadow of the Great Recession, world GDP per capita (PPP) stands at over $10,000 per year. About 1 billion live on less than $400 a year. Another billion live on less than $750 a year. Clearly there is enough to go around, we just suck at distribution. Is it really so crazy to imagine we could get those bottom 2 billion up to $1000 or $2000 a year?

In the field of pursuing the ideal human society, liberalism is the science of pursuing human well being. It combines the empiricism and rationalism of science with the goal of maximizing human happiness. The process is iterative and the specific means change as well meaning ideas are found wanting, and as science improves our understanding of humans themselves and what it takes to make them happy. There is no other school of thought that both seeks to improve the lot of all, and actually can do it. The ultimate goal of liberalism is that we should not need the word "liberalism" because no one would need a special word to describe the self-evident way people determine solutions to societal problems. That's what liberalism is, and why it must win or all humanity will fall back into ruin, scarcity, ignorance and fear. We live in a world with plenty of those things, but also a world where solutions to them are in reach, which was never true any time before. Après liberalism, le déluge.

Look, that's not "liberalism" — that's radical progressivism. And as long as these f**kers keep agitating for the neo-Stalinist revolution, I'll be out pushing back, smacking these freaks down like a whack-a-mole.

Follow me on Twitter

When I first started this blog, I still had a day job. This meant going out my door

at 7 am and coming home at like 8 or 9 pm at night. Twitter was the last thing on

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Despite my old friends at my day job telling me I'd never make it out of the "rat race",

in September of 2009 I went full time and now find Twitter even more important.

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