Comments on: Science influence on Twitter – June update

By: Science influence on Twitter – August update

Science influence on Twitter – August update — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 22:38:36 +0000

[...] Twitter Friends.” This is the third update of the indicators – the second was back in June. This time round, Mike Chelen (@MikeChelen) was kind enough to put together an application that [...]

By: Appreciating people who reach out: influencers revisited « Connectable Dots

Appreciating people who reach out: influencers revisited « Connectable Dots — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:51:18 +0000

[...] are putting a good deal of effort into deciding how to count … for example, comparing influential science-content twitter accounts … and how to display the counts and secondary calculations as a business venture… [...]

By: Kay O’Halloran interview on multimodal discourse: Part 1 of 3 « FrogHeart

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:29:48 +0000

[...] (I commented earlier about the bubble charts on June 23 and 24, 2009 and Maynard’s post is here. You might also want to check out the comments where Maynard explains few things that puzzled [...]

By: Ruth Seeley

Ruth Seeley — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:08:47 +0000

David’s definitely onto something re the language used to draw people in. Of course I’ve ended up watching some YouTube videos I’d rather not have known existed, but when you’re working with only 140 characters and a (shortened) URL, every character has to count, and ‘new blog post’ or ‘blog update’ may well be (ok in my view IS) a waste of precious verbal resources. I get much better response when I ask people to look at my ‘natural platinum highlights’ than when I ask them to look at my gray hairs.

By: Ununbium and ‘The Elements’ and an update of science policy doings in Canada and UK « FrogHeart

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:06:05 +0000

[...] My comments are in my June 23 and 24, 2009 postings and Andrew’s posts are here. [...]

By: Science Spotlight - June 26th, 2009 | Next Generation Science

Science Spotlight - June 26th, 2009 | Next Generation Science — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:12:48 +0000

[...] Science influence on Twitter – June update | 2020 Science [...]

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 07:38:00 +0000

So …is sciencebase more influential than 2020science? Tee hee….

Sciencebase and 2020science both have a similar number of followers, although 2020science’s follower to followee ratio is much higher than sciencebase. 2020science has tweeted around half the number of updates as sciencebase.

Seriously though, perhaps one of the most important confounding factors is the text of the tweet itself, the headline as it were:

“Scientists’ influence on Twitter analyzed” was sciencebase

“New blog posting, Science influence on Twitter – June update” was 2020science

Both mentioned Twitter, 2020science mentioned it was a new blog posting and an update, sciencebase simply stated what the content was without saying anything about timeliness. Not sure which is the “better” headline, the sciencebase tweet makes no suggestion that the reader may have seen it before though, that could have had an influence.

By: Tim Beauchamp

Tim Beauchamp — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:16:11 +0000

That will be an interesting experiment. I would guess that if there were slightly different foci in your previous twitter streams, it would weight your followers to follow a link on one subject over the other.

An example, your followers may have a higher concentration of people who are primarily interested in nanotechnology or even public science policy, where as Mr Bradley has a base of followers interested in science in general, or even music. A tweet about nanotech legislation may appeal to your followers more, where as a tweet about acoustics might appeal to his.

I wonder if the high likelihood that both of your groups followers enjoy participating in experiments and analysis might also weight the results.

I will be interested in hearing about the methodologies as well as the results.

By: Andrew Maynard

Andrew Maynard — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:56:04 +0000

Interestingly, David Bradly at ScienceBase (@sciencebase) and I posted separately trackable links to the post above on Twitter yesterday - at around the same time. Looking at the Twitter-specific hits we both received over the past day and comparing it to the indicators of influence is interesting: Hits from @sciencebase: 309
Hits from @2020science: 141
Ratio: 2.19 Ratio of primary followers: 1.06
Ratio of secondary followers: 2.41
Ratio of social capital: 2.26

You can see where I'm going here - assuming the ratio of our respective Twitter hits provides some indication of relative influence, it becomes possible to tease out the indicator of influence that is most relevant. In this case, social capital comes out on top.

Before you get too excited, this is just one datapoint, and there are a myriad other things that could have affected the result. But I thought it was interesting nevertheless.

Next challenge is developing a robust Twitter experiment to test the hypothesis that social capital is a reasonable indicator of influence...

By: Andrew Maynard

Andrew Maynard — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 19:24:27 +0000

Thanks! Just need to work out what it all means now…

By: Mr. Gunn

Mr. Gunn — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 01:10:03 +0000

Great job on the analysis, Andrew! So often we see these flimsy, hand-waving analyses, but here you’ve got real data. Nice!

By: Andrew Maynard

Andrew Maynard — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:57:09 +0000

My apologies – I’ve updated the information on Many Eyes, and the links to the corrected dataset and bubble charts.

Thanks for spotting this!

By: Mary Canady

Mary Canady — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:04:01 +0000

Hi–you still are missing an important tweep–@maverick_ny is wrong, it should be @maverickny, Sally Church. It was corrected in David’s post.

Mary

By: Nanotechnology metaphors and understanding visual data « FrogHeart

Nanotechnology metaphors and understanding visual data « FrogHeart — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:27:09 +0000

[...] looked at Andrew Maynard’s 2020 Science blog and found a posting that presents some visual data about science twittering. He has three spheres made of bubbles or [...]

By: Ruth Seeley

Ruth Seeley — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:59:15 +0000

Happy to assist. That’s five thank yous now. I’m reserving some time in September so I can do more next time. Wanders off muttering about honey and vinegar and flies.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:09:21 +0000

Thanks for your continued interest and fascinating analyses of the scientwists. The list has gone past the 500 mark and is still growing, although I haven’t publicised it much recently. I wonder whether there’s any way to tease out the influence just being on the list has had on the reach and followerships of the members of the list.

I gave the list a mention in an interview I did with Chemical & Engineering News at the beginning of the month and saw a little spike in activity.

Keep up the good work.