Doesn't everyone follow Barry Wellman AND Lady Gaga? That just means you're normal! I don't see much spam on Twitter at all - I mean, there are the spam accounts that follow you but I never see any actual spam because I don't follow back. It comes up sometimes when you search for a key word, but it's not something I see a lot - I guess it depends how you are monitoring Twitter and what search terms you're using, but compared to my home email where 2/3 of the mail is spam, Twitter is relatively quiet. The denial of large data sets is a curious one given how big they were not that long ago on the Library of Congress having a Twitter archive. I can't see how enforceable it's going to be, either. Ruth ________________________________________ From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of D.Yvette Wohn [yvettewohn@gmail.com] Sent: 05 March 2011 02:56 To: live Cc: AoIR-L Aoir Subject: Re: [Air-L] twitter useless to study? I think Twitter is a useful profiling tool. If you are following Barry Wellman *and* Lady Gaga, what does it mean? ;) @arcticpenguin On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 8:49 PM, live <human.factor.one@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't think it's useless to study in terms of *how* people communicate digitally. Lots of linguistic cues and language changes have begun in sms and then parlayed over to Twitter, where they're being solidified into standard language usage. Not getting the full subset of data doesn't matter if one is just studying the medium itself, and less the message(s).
Cheers, @SharonG
On Mar 4, 2011, at 3:09 PM, Barry Wellman 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
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