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Showing posts from 2010

Latest News Through Wikipedia - Wikipedians are the real Citizen Journalists

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People have long predicted the demise of traditional news media and the rise of the citizen journalists. Various initiatives have tried to create new media outlets on the Web, Blog, and Twitter powered by creative swarms of hobby journalists - but none of them has been a breakthrough success so far. Well, it turns out that there is such a citizen Web site, venerable old Wikipedia! In a series of earlier projects we have analyzed collaboration among Wikipedia authors when creating new Wikipedia articles, for example studying how they collaborate as COINs in different cultures (http://www.ickn.org/documents/COINS2010_Nemoto_Gloor.pdf). In our current project we are creating a map based on Who-works-with-whom-on-Wikipedia (the "W5-map"). We build a semantic network of concepts by constructing a link between two Wikipedia articles if the same author has worked on both articles. This W5-map shows us to what kind of articles the swarm flocks to. By repeating this pr

How Much Are People Smiling in the US, Germany, and Switzerland?

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Who are happier, people in Switzerland, in Germany, or in the US? To answer this question, I looked at the use of smiley’s in Twitter tweets – smileys are those emoticons used to express one’s emotions like :) smile :D big grin :( sad, frown :P sticking the tongue out, “raspberry” My hypothesis is that the larger the fraction of happy smileys :) and :D in all tweets containing emoticons is, the happier people in this region are. Using Condor’s Twitter collector, I collected 24 hours worth of tweets containing the smileys listed above in 6 cities in three countries: New York and Los Angeles (USA), Berlin and Hamburg (Germany) and Zurich and Berne (Switzerland). I collected all tweets inside a radius of 25 kilometers around the geocoordinates of these 6 cities returned by Google. The table below lists the results, showing the number of people using each emoticon in each city, as well as the betweenness centrality of the emoticon in the social network of people using it. As we can se

Another Day of Hope (mostly), and some Fear and Worry in the US

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Today I checked on the mood of the US Population through Twitter, using Twitter’s Geotagging feature. Alan Mislove from Northeastern had already found that the mood of the nation changes over the course of the day, with people having a low over lunch, and getting collectively happier in the evening, when work is over. Using our Twitter-collector-tool built into Condor , I was able to easily replicate this result. I counted the number of retweets about “hope”, “fear”, and “worry” in the major population centers of the US, by collecting the tweets at four 2000 kilometers circles with centers at Pittburgh (North East), Atlanta (South East) Las Vegas (South West), and Boise (North West). (see picture below) I then constructed the social network between the retweeters as described in a previous blog post . The way it is calculated, it also factors in the importance of the retweeters, where a link is drawn between two people if a person retweets a post from the other person. The picture abo

Monitoring Midterm Election Night Through Twitter Buzz

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Yesterday November 2nd 2010 was midterm election day in the US. I was curious what Twitter would tell us about the mood of the voters. It was already clear that things did not look good for the Democrats. In prior work analyzing data from 2009 we had already found that monitoring posts for the occurrence of “hope”, “happy”, “fear”, and “worry” would give us a good proxy for the mood of the population, particularly if we focused on the retweeted posts. So this time I repeatedly ran our Twitter data collector in 30 minute intervals, each time collecting the 200 most retweeted Tweets containing either hope, happy, fear, or worry. The picture below shows all tweets, with the red dots depicting the tweets containing more than one of the search words. Measuring the betweenness value (i.e. the importance of the search term) shows that popular tweeters prefer tweeting about “happy” (32%) and “hope” (30%) over the “worry” (19%) and “fear” (19%) tweets. Note that I collected precisely the sam

Emotions Draw Close Friends: Analyzing the Social Network Structure of Facebook Fan Pages

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Recently we were wondering if the social network structure of fans of a brand, a star, or a cause tells us how passionate the fans are. To be more precise, we were looking at the network structure of the friendship network of Facebook fan pages. This means that we collected – as far a publicly accessible – the friendship network of the people who clicked on the “like” button on a fan page. For a start, look at the fan page of our own COINs2010 conference (by the way, the conference will be soon in Savannah Oct 7 to 9, at SCAD, we hope to see many of you there ☺ ). The dark dots in the network are the fans of COINs2010, the green dots are their friends. This means that for this initial analysis we looked at how many and how well-connected friends a fan of COINs2010 has. We ignored direct links between the fans, but focused on their external friendship network. In this first attempt we looked at a total of 15 fan groups in 5 categories, see the table below: We (admittedly subjectively

Predicting Stock Market Indicators Through Twitter “I hope it is not as bad as I fear”

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We have been working on trying to predict market indicators for quite some time by analyzing Web Buzz , predicting who will win an Oscar, or how well movies do at the box office . Among other things we have correlated posts about a stock on Yahoo Finance and Motley’s Fool with the actual stock price, predicting the closing price of the stock on the next day based on what people say today on Yahoo Finance, on the Web and Blogs about a stock title. The rising popularity of twitter gives us a new great way of capturing the collective mind up to the last minute. In our current project we analyze the positive and negative mood of the masses on twitter, comparing it with broad stock market indices such as Dow Jones, S&P 500, and NASDAQ. We collected the twitter feeds from one whitelisted IP for six months from March 30, 2009 to Sept 4, 2009, ranging from 5680 to 42820 tweets per day. According to twitter this corresponds to a randomized subsample of about one hundredth of the full volum

My new Coolfarming Book out

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I am delighted to announce that – finally - my new book "Coolfarming - Turn Your Idea Into The Next Big Thing" just came out. “Coolfarming” is about how to grow your own trends by creating an environment where COINs (Collaborative Innovation Networks) flourish; then - once a product has become established - extend the creative pool into a Collaborative Learning Network, or CLN, whereby a targeted group of interested people are brought in to learn the basics of the product, make suggestions for improvements, point out deficiencies, and push the idea forward. When this feedback gets incorporated, things get really interesting, expanding the process further outward to a Collaborative Interest Network (CIN) that encompasses thousands or even millions of users, building what hopefully turns into a loyal fan base…and virtually guaranteeing the success of the idea. Based on case studies and examples from Linux to the Twilight series, from Procter & Gamble to Apple, this book let

Predicting the World Cup 2010 Winner

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Today I was giving a presentation about Coolhunting through Swarm Creativity at the CRM Forum in Zurich. As there is currently Soccer World Championship time in South Africa, at the end, the moderator Susanne Wille asked me to make my predictions about which team would win the World Cup. Unfortunately, reading the collective mind on the Web does not predict the outcome of 22 soccer players fighting each other particularly well, not to speak about inexplicable decisions of the referee. I therefore refused to make a prediction. Nevertheless, of course we have our prediction system running on our new CoolTrend 2.0 for the last few weeks, because the wisdom of the crowd is still better than chance, although not on the level of accuracy we can reach when predicting political elections or movie box office returns. So here are our trend curves about which team will win the World Cup, as of June 24, 2010, first the trends on the Web, then on the Blogs The first thing to note are the huge os

When are we ready for eternal life?

Well, I guess most of us would like to live forever. At least that’s what I think when I see how old people are clinging to their lives. On the other hand, if all of us would live forever, while producing more offspring, earth would soon overflow. So the solution, if we get eternal life, would be to have no children anymore. This, however, is in contradiction to Darwin’s evolution. We need to reproduce, to mix our gene pool, and adapt to the changes in environment. Evolution is brutal, too. It’s all about survival of the fittest, of trying to beat the competitor and make sure that my own genes reproduce. Mankind is no exception among the other species. The history of mankind is a history of wars, of killing one's enemies. Today this has been ritualized; the Geneva Convention describes what’s allowed and what’s not. But this is still far from perfect, frequently broken, abused, or ignored. The conclusion is, then, that we will be ready for eternal life when we will have reached per

50 best blogs on creative thinking

This morning I got a nice e-mail from Anna Miller, alerting me to the fact that the swarmcreativity blog has been listed in her post on " 50 Best Blogs on Creative Thinking ". I quickly looked at them, excellent selection. Thanks Anna!

The world’s greatest coolfarmers – what we can learn from Jazz

Yesterday evening I was part of a great coolfarming experience. It was the final performance of Jazzaar , a one week workshop of practical music for talented young musicians culminating in public concerts on Friday and Saturday evening. Jazzaar is the brainchild of Fritz Renold , a Jazz musician, composer and music teacher. Every year since 1998 Jazzaar invites internationally renowned Jazz musicians to Aarau, where they teach and play with the most talented and motivated young musicians age 14 to 24 of the Canton of Aargau. For me how Jazz musicians play together is a great blueprint for how creative teams should work together. In Jazz, improvisation isn't a matter of just making old things up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammar and vocabulary. There's no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others. According to “ A Passion for Jazz ”…”Jazz players will choose phrases that seem to be preordained so they intuitively know where they are going, even

What Motivates Creators – Lessons from a Cool Artist

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Little did I know when I was attending one of the evening events of Swissnex that I was about to meet a truly impressive creator. After filling a heaped plate of food at the sumptuous buffet after the talks, I was looking for a place to eat when I noticed two attractive women in the back of the room. As soon as we started talking I noticed that they were not just a pleasure to look at and talk with but real creators. In my discussion with Magdalena, she told me that she was a graphic artist producing digital art . When she invited me to visit her in her studio I jumped at the opportunity. On a sunny afternoon the next week I climbed the stairs to her studio in Revere outside of Boston. The studio doubles as a gallery, displaying really cool art. When we sat on her couch in the middle of art books and framed digital pictures, Magdalena told me a bit about her life. She was born in Poland to parents of German descent, as a young adult she moved to Germany, later after she had married a
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Oscar Predictions Updated Here is an updated analysis of the Oscar predictions, run on March 2 nd , 2010. Again, sources being used were the collective mind of movie enthusiasts on IMDb.com and movie fans from all around the world represented by bloggers and Web masters. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) was analyzed using a specialized version of sentiment retrieval with an adapted bag-of-words. Web and blog buzz values come from Cooltrend . Tapping the thoughts of this swarm delivered the following update to our older analysis: While IMDb users have two clear favorites, Hurt Locker and Avatar, the Web seems to favor Hurt Locker. Bloggers are seeing 500 Days of Summer in front right now, but this might change since the blogosphere tends to be relatively volatile in opinion trends. So, in sum we would expect Avatar to have the best chances on winning best picture, followed by Hurt Locker. Directors – here it is again a head-to-head race between Kathryn Bigelow (Hurt Locker)

It’s In a Name - How much is an athlete worth?

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These days Forbes again published sport’s top earning athletes. In spite of his transgressions, Tiger Woods still leads the pack with $64 million, followed by soccer player David Beckham ($18 million), tennis star Roger Federer ($16 million), Nascar driver Dale Earnhardt ($14 million) and basket ball players LeBron James ($13 million) and Kobe Bryant ($12 million). I was curious to see if Web buzz and valuation of a player's attractiveness for corporate marketing executives from Nike, Addidas, Reebook and the like had any correlation. The two pictures below show the Web buzz share of five of the six athletes (I skipped the Nascar driver): And the blog buzz share: As the pictures show, the ranking at the top corresponds nicely. Tiger Woods is lonely at the top both on the Web and on blogs, but then there are some interesting differences. Kobe Bryant has more than his share on Web buzz compared to what corporate marketers paid for him, which means they got a good deal considering h

Oscar Predictions 2010 – Official Nominations of 82nd Academy Awards

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Oscar Night is getting closer. On Tuesday Hollywood announced this year’s official nominees of the 82nd Academy Awards. As previously posted on this blog we are running our own Oscar predictions based on buzz in the Oscar forum on imdb.com and Web and Blog buzz analysis. Our latest results presented here were calculated on January 5th 2010 which is over one month before the nominations were released. In our analysis we focus on four categories, best picture, best director, best actress, and best actor. The following table for best picture shows the results of our Oscar-Coolhunting four weeks ago. We computed an Oscar Index for every movie. This index consists of combined Web-, blog-, and message board – buzz and can be interpreted as the relative probability of a movie to receive an Academy Award on March 7th. Our approach simply measures what the Web (this means all of us) thinks. It works by multiplying the “how many” with the “who”, i.e. multiplying what somebody says (in a forum o

Who will become the next Massachusetts Senator

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The race to fill Ted Kennedy's vacant senatorial seat in Washington has turned into a real shocker. At the outset, it seemed clear that in deeply democratic Massachusetts only a Democrat could become the next senator. As of today, it seems to be the other way. Republican candidate Scott Brown is ahead of Democrat Martha Coakley by 5 points . I wanted to know what the Web would tell us. The picture below shows the daily betweenness values of the two candidates, we can cleary see how Scott Brown is gaining on Martha Coakley. It seems however, that there is a silver lining for Ms. Coakley, at least in the blogosphere. The next picture shows her centrality as of today (January 15). She is ahead by 6 percentage points. The last picture, just for fun, shows the Blogpost-Network leading to the percentages. The red dots are the Web sites promoting both candidates. The brown dots promote Mr Brown, but it seems that the green (should really be blue) Web sites carry some more weight, leadin

Scientists, Monks and Bankers - It's All About Love

Why do people collaboratively engage in innovative tasks? What’s the motivation to work together to develop something new? After all, if I do everything by myself, I will reap all the rewards for myself, and don’t have to share. Nevertheless, humans are the most social species of all, and progress is only possible by collectively creating new things “standing on the shoulders of giants”, by learning from what others have done, and apply it in novel ways. According to my colleagues at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence Tom Malone , Rob Laubacher , and Chris Dellarocas there are three main reasons why people engage in collective intelligence systems: Money – financial gain is a strong motivator for people participating in markets and traditional organizations, either for direct payment, or for future payment, e.g. acquiring new skills. Glory – getting recognition and building up a reputation can be an important motivator. Love – love can be an important motivator, be it beca