Graph of how #topics get played out on Twitter
From The Guardian's Meg Pickard, a graph that "compares 'people talking about #topic' and 'people talking about talking about #topic'. Outside of Twitter, this applies to pretty much any popular newsworthy topic...the news quickly moves from 'we're telling you about Topic X' to media coverage of the media coverage of Topic X. See: Twitter's own coverage in the media currently." (Pithy description from Kottke)
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While the trend graph is cool, it doesn't take into account the tweeple psychology. The trending topic display on Twitter, itself makes people write more about it.
Thanks
Kishore Dharmarajan
So this is talking about people who are talking about people who are talking about #topic.
Doran - absolutely (the graph is 100% fauxiology). Welcome to irony corner: try the veal.
Interesting but does it hae any useful nformation? Noah Lieske
This also doesn't take into account that several 'people' mentioning that something is a trending topic are actually bots. In the vast majority of cases in which I have been involved in trending topics associated with conferences or events, the duration of the trend is usually over the period of the richest discussion at the event, and a surge at the end of the day will usually take place when individuals get home and wish to share their responses to the event. Thus when you clean the data to remove all bots, you find there is less 'media coverage about media coverage' and much more meaningful perspectives on ideas.
Oddly enough, after initially dismissing this graph as merely kinda interesting, it's occurring to me that this may be one of the more important pieces of information about the digital age in its current form.
It not only says a lot about the lifetime of certain types of information, I think it might eventually have a significant impact on economics one day.
Call me crazy, but I'd say this was very important.
I especially enjoyed the reference to Gartner's hype-cycle terminology
If you look at the graph, you'll see that it IS possible to actually care less (than zero).
Then comes the Internet media's coverage of the media's coverage of the media's coverage of #topic on Twitter. Increasing the order of irrelevance with each generation of coverage. It looks as though Twitter has reached the 'Late surge of relevance by people who just now noticed that it was a trending topic' stage.
And then there are people like me who see the #topics, wonder offhandedly about them and then move on to see if there are any doughnuts in the house.
I remain on the plateau of indifference except when sugar and saturated fats are involved,
Becky
I'd like to see a graph of the (similar?) cycle for memes.
And then Twitter ate it's own ass.
This discussion demonstrates that talking about how we talk or why we talk can be useful and interesting, although rarely as interesting as the initial DUDE THIS DOG IS RIDING A SKATEBOARD.
Re: "talking about media's coverage of talking about talking about a topic" and each higher meta level should be categorized as "talking about talking".
Is the writing in that graph supposed to be legible to someone without an electron microscope?
If you follow the link to Flikr you can view it large.
WHY IS IT IRRELEVANT.
I think DEIDZOEB got it right, this can be generalize as talking about talking.
it reminds me of onthemedia.org , npr radio show focus on how media covers what it covers. this is not actually irrelevant b/c it helps discover whether coverage is bias , lacking, overdone , etc.
Calling this meta talk, irrelevant is like saying , we know where we are now, so we don't need to know our speed. and when we know our speed , we don't need to know our acceleration.
Signal to noise ratio approaches zero rapidly as attention-starved people post as many vacuous strings containing popular hash tags as possible.
Wow.. thanks for the totally made-up data with the totally made-up explanation
#1
I thought it does? Reasonably explicitly actually. You'd have to take an incredibly narrow view of what the graph shows to say that it's not affected by being a trending topic itself.
The fact that "People talking about talking about #topic" appears on the same, cumulative graph as "People talking about #topic" shows that they're both being counted. If it was two separate lines then yeah, I would agree he's missed the joke but they're not. They're stacked on top of each other. It's a comment on how any mention is counted just the same as a relevant, on topic mention.
And so the real question is, what do we do about it? Will there be a way to filter out the sea of meta in the future in order to get to the core data?
is this issue trending? Excuse my while I notify a few strangers
bwahahah- these comments are better than the graph
-griff
May 17th 12AM to May 18 1 AM = 25 hours.
You can all stop commenting on this (#)topic now.
This isn't an XKCD strip? ;]
I just got Twitter the board game! It's great.