wanderingstan

Its amazing to me how much interest there is in analyzing the huge body of work that is now available in blogs and other social media. I just heard a very interesting talk by Hugo Liu about Gender Modeling.

For example, consider this graph that shows the sorts of “time” words used by men and women. It seems that women write much more about the here-and-now, near future, and on a day-of-the-week scale. And men write more about the future, and on a month scale.

And this graph shows use of pronouns by gender. Top is female, bottom is male.

And perhaps coolest of all, they applied their algorithms to create male and female versions of Google news. You can see the demo here.

The full paper is available online and has many more interesting tidbits. All graphs in this post were taken from it.

(You might also enjoy the Gender Genie. It worked on my blog and on Tara Hunt’s HorsePigCow.)

The ICWSM conference opened today with a talk by Evan Williams of Twitter, and formerly of Blogger fame.

My takeaways from his talk:

Functionality is becoming a commodity.

You used to use a service because it did what you need. Now there are a million services offering the same functionality. (Think of all the Delicious, Digg, YouTube, etc.. clones.)

Twitter is about Ambient Intimacy

Great phrase to describe it.

The more casual a social media system is, the closer the ratio of producers to consumers.

This is rich. So blogging made it easier for people to produce content, and a fair number of blog readers converted into blog producers. But blogging isn’t that easy–HTML, permalinks, wordpress installs…not to mention the effort of forming well structured paragraphs. Twitter is even easier.

I suppose this works in the opposite extreme as well: The ratio of TV show viewers TV producers is huge. But video sites are making it easier, thus lowering that average.

And at the other extreme? Hard to imagine anything easier than typing 140 characters. Maybe something that reads your physiological state directly (e.g. level of arousal). Or something that involves choosing nubmers between 1 and 10 like Buster McLeod’s Morale-O-Meter. I’ve been tracking my morale for a while as you can see here:

More on the conference as I find time…