I'm studying academic uses of Twitter (e.g. at conferences) and haven't really encountered spam in that context. I think increasingly the question is what specific kind of discourse or group of communicators you want to study inside a social media channel like Twitter or FB, rather than taking the fire hose approach. Cornelius On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 3:44 AM, S. Courtney Walton <scw@umail.ucsb.edu>wrote:
I'm wrapping up a quantitative content analysis of Twitter, looking at levels of self-disclosure among professional and parent bloggers.
Spam hasn't been an issue with the 300 public users in the study.
On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Barry Wellman <wellman@chass.utoronto.ca
wrote:
As an object of study, its hard to do quant analysis of Twitter now because so much of it is spam (unless you're studying spam, that is).
And even qualitative analyses will have to be careful.
Our 2 Twitterology papers got into the sweet spot when Twitter was an appreciable size but before spam dominated (about 80% of my new would-be Followers)
OTOH, I find Twitter useful for research leads -- such as the Atlantic article a tweep broadcast today about how the Internet almost fractured -- or Zeynep et al's (@techsoc) discussion of social media and MENA revolutions. Barry Wellman _______________________________________________________________________
S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC NetLab Director Department of Sociology 725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388 University of Toronto Toronto Canada M5S 2J4 twitter:barrywellman http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman fax:+1-416-978-3963 Updating history: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _______________________________________________________________________
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-- Best Regards,
S. Courtney Walton scw@umail.ucsb.edu
MA/PhD Student Department of Communication 4309 Social Sciences & Media Studies Bldg University of California, Santa Barbara 93106 _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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