Conversation retrieval from Social Media

Next week Matteo is going to Dublin for the annual European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR). We are presenting a demo of our Conversation retrieval system for Social Media and Social Network Sites. While the addition of Social aspect to traditional online searches has been around for some times we are following a different approach. [...]

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SIGSNA research: brochure

We’ve recently done a small brochure to present our recent researches. If you want to download it and enjoy our cool visualizations there’s the PDF file.

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SIGSNA TwitterGet: a Twitter downloading tool

When we started our researches on Twitter propagation we, as many others, used the well known Twapperkeeper service in order to save and download Tweets. Later we moved toward an ad hoc solution which was highly customised for our specific needs and infrastructure. Recently due to a change in Twitter policy Twapperkeeper removed the export [...]

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#rifarelitalia dynamic ReTweet Chain

[Italian] “Per Rifare l’Italia” was a conference hold in the Italian Lower Chamber (Campera dei Deputati) on Feb. 2 2011, organised by Telecom Italia – Working Capital about the strategies to bring a higher level of innovation in Italy (the hashtag sound like “rebuilding Italy). Keynote speaker was Edmund S. Phelps (winner of the 2006 [...]

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What if Twitter wasn’t the fastest one…

[Italiano] We have recently done some comparative analysis between Twitter propagation dynamics and FriendFeed propagation dynamics. We chose, as our case study, the news related to the rescue operations of the San Josè mining accident (that left 33 men trapped 700 metres (2,300 ft) below ground for 69 days) [I'm not describing the research now, [...]

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Building your Twitter replynet with SQLite

Data preparation is one of the most important and interesting part of every research activity. Recently I’ve really enjoyed Axel’s posts about how to extract conversation networks out of Twapperkeeper archives. Axel uses awk which is a very powerful and flexible tool to manipulate csv files. Obviously there are several ways to manipulate a csv [...]

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FriendFeed Under A Microscope

[Italiano] A group of Students from the School of Information and the School of Public Health of the Univeristy of Michigan have done some very nice visualisation work using our latest dataset. We’ve been in touch with Guangming Lang for some time to explain them the data structure and few insights and then they did [...]

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When followers are not enough

[italian version] We have just gathered a brand new datased of FriendFeed data (you can download it in the Data section, it’s named 2010-a dataset ). Since it is considerably larger than our previous database we decided to test few more hypotesis on information propagation in SNSs. One of the key concepts speaking about the [...]

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IR11: Sustainability, Participation, Action

Last week I’ve been at the IR11 Conference (the annual conference of the association of Internet researchers) where I presented the SIGSNA research on the propagation of information in Friendfeed – starting from the analysis of the death of Mike Bongiorno – [see slides below]. IR11 was a great experience and aoir is probably one [...]

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To whom are you speaking? Egonetwork over time

Last version of Gephi introduced some very nice feature. It is now possible to work with dynamic networks that can easily be observed in their evolution. Working with dynamic networks is crucial when you are dealing with social networks, like those existing in microblogging sites, that show a high level of variability: social connections quickly change over time and – even if the connection does not disappear – the use of a specific connection can be very different from time to time. Observing such a phenomenon could be difficult with a static SNA but with a dynamic perspective it becomes quite simple.

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