

What Tim O'Reilly, Lady Gaga, and Marissa Mayer All Have In Common - ptwobrussell
http://miningthesocialweb.com/2013/11/22/what-do-tim-oreilly-lady-gaga-and-marissa-mayer-all-have-in-common/

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travisvan415
With Twitter automation, I think it's an understatement to say that following
count is not a reliable measure of influence. Your two subjects here have real
world influence, and it's reasonable that they could arrive at those huge
following #'s without gaming Twitter.

But I've noticed that certain popular tech news blogs (for example) - every
single time they have a post, there are hundreds of Twitter accounts that
retweet the content, instantaneously. And of those accounts, they ONLY tweet
that outlet's content. I think investigating those most popular tech blogs'
average "what happens when they post an article" via this type of Jaccard
index would be an interesting exercise in exposing some tomfoolery, and
enlightening in seeing how much stuff is being gamed. Knowing what we know
about human nature, is there any doubt that people are going to great lengths
to juice their follower counts and game the appearance of getting
"engagement?"

The threads being pulled in this post have really interesting implications for
type of analysis of "what's really going on" both in terms of a Twitter
profile's following, and the authenticity of the "sharing" that occurs among
their followers when they post something.

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mathattack
Very true. Followers is a very weak approximation. It's almost like utilizing
just pagerank on a search engine. In many ways measuring influence is
analogous to creating a search engine. You constantly have to search out and
avoid the noise.

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jyeee
+1 mathattack -- in terms of understanding, I couldn't agree more about just
measuring followers. It's like saying you understand a person by the volume of
mail they send/receive without looking at what's in the envelope.

Really big fan of @SocialWebMining's work and I hope to see some articles
about what's being said in tweets, and I think that we'd both like that a
lot...

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DrPeterHamilton
Please add @AngelProfessor@RebelMouse to such distinguished list. Please
confirm of course via LinkIn: Dr Peter Hamilton, University of Destiny,
searching People not Companies.

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DrPeterHamilton
Please consider adding Dr Peter Hamilton @LinkedIn to that list

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glamp
didn't know about Jaccard index. great code examples

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vijucat
Some "distance-metric porn" here :
[http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/proxy/vignettes/overv...](http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/proxy/vignettes/overview.pdf)

proxy::dist() in R in case you want to quickly try some of them.

Frechet distance is interesting, too:

"Imagine a dog walking along one curve and the dog's owner walking along the
other curve, connected by a leash. Both walk continuously along their
respective curve from the prescribed start point to the prescribed end point
of the curve. Both may vary their speed, and even stop, at arbitrary positions
and for arbitrarily long. However, neither can backtrack. The Fréchet distance
between the two curves is the length of the shortest leash (not the shortest
leash that is sufficient for all walks, but the shortest leash of all the
leashes) that is sufficient for traversing both curves in this manner." (from
Wikipedia)

I remember trying it out as a way of quantifying how two related stocks' price
movements can diverge (just as an example application).

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ptwobrussell
Nice!

