The War on Attention Poverty: Measuring Twitter Authority
As social networks like Facebook and Twitter have grown in popularity, we've had ample opportunity to appreciate Herb Simon's admonition that "a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention". Since there is no way we can hope to follow all of the information being shared by our social networks, we need some filtering or ranking mechanism.
A broad class of approaches involves determining which authors are the most authoritative or influential. There are already a variety of proposed authority measures, as well as research on their effectiveness. In this talk, I will review the various attempts that have been made to measure Twitter authority. In particular, I will discuss the work on TunkRank, a measure inspired by PageRank that explicitly models attention scarcity.
28. 80% of users... ...have at least 80% of their friends as followers TwitterRank: finding topic-sensitive influential twitterers. [Weng et al, WSDM 2010]
29.
30.
31. Retweet counts are low: less than 2% of tweets State of the Twittersphere [Zarrella, June 2009]
34. What Should We Measure? “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means... a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes... the attention of its recipients.” Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World [Herbert Simon, 1971]
38. Simple Recurrence Measures expected propagation of tweet from X p notice = total attention user devotes to Twitter p retweet = probability that user retweets Note Following(Y) in denominator!
48. Research TwitterRank: finding topic-sensitive influential twitterers. [Weng et al, 2010] Overcoming Spammers in Twitter – A Tale of Five Algorithms [Gayo-Avello and Brenes, 2010] Nepotistic Relationships in Twitter and their Impact on Rank Prestige Algorithms [Gayo-Avello, 2010]
63. Thank you! ...and thanks to Jason Adams for developing and maintaining the http://tunkrank.com site! Questions? Email: [email_address] Twitter: @dtunkelang Blog: http://thenoisychannel.com/