Microblogging

About: Microblogging is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4186 publications have been published within this topic receiving 137030 citations. The topic is also known as: microblog.

Hashtag lifespan and social networks during the london riots

Abstract: Social media is a powerful medium for rapidly sharing information and organizing response in times of crisis or extreme events. Twitter users have adopted a convention of hashtags to support this and other uses of microblogging services. Using Twitter data from the 2011 London riots, we analyze emergent social networks directly relating to response to crisis. We examine networks of riot response oriented around cleanup or prayer activities. These networks differ in size, structure, general membership, and prominent actors. We explore whether temporal patterns observed in social media, such as hashtag "lifespan," may relate to observed social processes and behaviors.

How Much Is Said in a Tweet? A Multilingual, Information-theoretic Perspective

Abstract: This paper describes a multilingual study on how much information is contained in a single post of microblog text from Twitter in 26 different languages. In order to answer this question in a quantitative fashion, we take an information-theoretic approach, using entropy as our criterion for quantifying “how much is said” in a tweet. Our results find that, as expected, languages with larger character sets such as Chinese and Japanese contain more information per character than other languages. However, we also find that, somewhat surprisingly, information per character does not have a strong correlation with information per microblog post, as authors of microblog posts in languages with more information per character do not necessarily use all of the space allotted to them. Finally, we examine the relative importance of a number of factors that contribute to whether a language has more or less information content in each character or post, and also compare the information content of microblog text with more traditional text from Wikipedia.

Attention dynamics on the Chinese social media Sina Weibo during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract: Understanding attention dynamics on social media during pandemics could help governments minimize the effects. We focus on how COVID-19 has influenced the attention dynamics on the biggest Chinese microblogging website Sina Weibo during the first four months of the pandemic. We study the real-time Hot Search List (HSL), which provides the ranking of the most popular 50 hashtags based on the amount of Sina Weibo searches. We show how the specific events, measures and developments during the epidemic affected the emergence of different kinds of hashtags and the ranking on the HSL. A significant increase of COVID-19 related hashtags started to occur on HSL around January 20, 2020, when the transmission of the disease between humans was announced. Then very rapidly a situation was reached where COVID-related hashtags occupied 30-70% of the HSL, however, with changing content. We give an analysis of how the hashtag topics changed during the investigated time span and conclude that there are three periods separated by February 12 and March 12. In period 1, we see strong topical correlations and clustering of hashtags; in period 2, the correlations are weakened, without clustering pattern; in period 3, we see a potential of clustering while not as strong as in period 1. We further explore the dynamics of HSL by measuring the ranking dynamics and the lifetimes of hashtags on the list. This way we can obtain information about the decay of attention, which is important for decisions about the temporal placement of governmental measures to achieve permanent awareness. Furthermore, our observations indicate abnormally higher rank diversity in the top 15 ranks on HSL due to the COVID-19 related hashtags, revealing the possibility of algorithmic intervention from the platform provider.

Can twitter be an alternative of real-world sensors?

Abstract: Twitter is the most famous on-line microblogging service now. People can post (tweet) what they are doing in 140 characters. Since Twitter posts (tweets) reflect what people are looking, hearing, feeling and so on, we can obtain information about Real-world phenomena through the large amount of tweets. In other words, Twitter can be regarded as a sensor of Real-world phenomena including natural phenomena such as hay fever. This motivated us to investigate whether can Twitter be an alternative of Real-world Sensor. In this paper, we first describe about our system which collects and analyzes tweets in order to generates a hay fever map just like as a weather report map. There are some difficulties such as location estimation and normalization of number of tweets. Using the output of the system, we discuss the comparison with actual pollen data gathered by real sensors. The result shows that Twitter can reflect natural phenomena in some particular areas.

Social Media Engagement and the Critical Care Medicine Community

Abstract: Over the last decade, social media has transformed how we communicate in the medical community. Microblogging through platforms such as Twitter has made social media a vehicle for succinct, targeted, and innovative dissemination of content in critical care medicine. Common uses of social media in medicine include dissemination of information, knowledge acquisition, professional networking, and patient advocacy. Social media engagement at conferences represents all of these categories and is often the first time health-care providers are introduced to Twitter. Most of the major critical care medicine conferences, journals, and societies leverage social media for education, research, and advocacy, and social media users can tailor the inflow of content based on their own interests. From these interactions, networks and communities are built within critical care medicine and beyond, overcoming the barriers of physical proximity. In this review, we summarize the history and current status of health-care social media as it relates to critical care medicine and provide a primer for those new to health-care social media with a focus on Twitter, one of the most popular microblogging platforms.