Tomorrow morning, social media and marketing researcher Dan Zarrella is debuting a new way to see into the minds of Twitter users by analyzing their most recent 1,000 tweets.
TweetPsych uses two linguistic analysis methods to build a psychological profile of a person based on the content of their tweets. It compares the content of a user's tweets to a baseline reading Zarella built by analyzing over 1.5 million random tweets and shows the areas where that user stands out. It also reminded us of two other fascinating apps that show how long a user has been on Twitter and with whom they hold most of their @reply conversations. Being socially minded journalists, we've made bookmarklets for all three services.
Two of Richmond's leading bloggers, Jeff Kelley and Ian Graham, sat down at a recent Social Media Club event to talk about journalism, politics, satire, and how new media is changing the game.
From parody sites being taken too seriously to fake news items somehow ending up on major news websites, the two tackle a wide spectrum of new media and industrial media issues. They also get to chat about the legitimacy and credentials of new media journalists and how many social media users have ended up being the first to report or broadcast important news in recent months.
At a recent Social Media Club event in Richmond, Virginia, we caught up with local NBC television reporter Rachel DePompa and local political and news blogger John Sarvay.
The pair had just wrapped up a panel discussion on social media and the news. Although each provides coverage of overlapping spaces, they both had unique insights on gathering and reporting the news, as well as using social media to reach the public.
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The Internet (or at least Twitter and MySpace) bade farewell to Trent Reznor and Stephanie Meyer respectively, if not respectfully, last week. Each of them blamed incessant harassment by trolls for their departures.
Some may roll their eyes and dismiss these complaints as thin-skinned... but it's hard to underestimate just how debilitating the deluge of abuse can be. While XKCD offered one ingenious solution to the problem, and others are suggesting an end to anonymity online, I'm inclined to agree with Sarah Perez, who suggests the only real answer, for now, is that celebrities who can't cope with the torrent of crap should staff up with a communications team to handle it for them.
Are you itching to get out of the office and network with your peers? Why not head out to one of the venues listed in our roundup of upcoming social Web events. The events guide is a regular feature here on ReadWriteWeb. We publish it every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans.
Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.
Note: This post was written at midnight PST last night, at which point CNN.com was hours behind much of the rest of online media in prioritizing the big news in Iran. The site has since focused on Iran but we believe this post remains relevant in discussing concerns about what sources are first in covering important events. For really good journalism on these events, see Robert Fisk's account.
The western world's most feared government is shaking with insurrection in the streets after a contested election and the leading name in news, CNN, is shockingly absent from the story. Twitter, meanwhile, is how Iranians are communicating with the outside world. It's the best place to follow events going on in that country and CNN's failure to engage with the story is one of the hottest topics of conversation there.
Hours after Iranian police began clashing with tens of thousands of people in the street, the top story on CNN.com remains peoples' confusion about the switch from analog TV signals.
Microblogging has become a very popular way for people to share news and information or even live-blog events in real time, but if you have ever tried to search through services like Twitter using only Google, the Twitter native search or any number of other services, you know how difficult it can be to find exactly what you're after. Today the Google Operating System blog reports that Google will be launching a new microblogging search service that will sort results by relevance and integrate those results with its own web search engine to trigger a "microblog universal search group", closely related to the way Google Blog Search works. If it turns out to be true, this is great news to those of us who constantly search Twitter for the latest news and trends.
Microsoft launched its new search engine Bing earlier this month and one of its great new features is a video search tool called called Smart Motion Previews. It's a preview feature that let you view and listen to part of a video by hovering over it with your mouse.
This is all fine and dandy, but when it was discovered that it worked for porn site previews also, and that it could be easily accessed by kids, it caused quite a bit of concern among parents. Bing had noted on its blog how to use Smart Motion Previews in combination with its SafeSearch feature, but apparently it was still very easy for kids to view explicit adult content on its site. Yesterday Microsoft announced that it has made changes that will make it easier for parents to block and monitor what their kids are watching when they visit Bing.
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we cover the latest iPhone announcements from Apple, look at some new real-time web products that we have high hopes for, investigate the impact trolls are having on social media, discuss the sociology of Twitter, and more. We also update you with the latest from our new channel ReadWriteStart, dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.
