The burstiness of social media

I have been thinking about the patterns of activity in my own blog and in my social media behaviour in general.  There are times when a certain topic will attract heaps of traffic and discussion and other times when my blog stats look like they have flat lined.  Over the past two days on Facebook I have been caught up in a couple of examples of bursty activity.  The first was a six degrees of separation group (this one was about wine-buddies).  Where you forward an invitation to friends to join the group. I usually ignore these requests, but the subject was so specific that it didn’t feel like spam when I sent off the requests – certainly those friends that I had shared a good bottle of wine with wouldn’t mind me acknowledging that fact.

The other was a meme (see http://famartinniemi.wordpress.com/2008/10/08/meme-me-up-scottie/).  Memes always peak my interest because I really want to find a way to incorporate meme-behaviour in blog-based interviewing for my research.  It always amazes me how easily people will participate in a meme and how quickly they spread.  The latest one in my Facebook social circle (and beyond by now I am sure) is the “p57 sentence 5 of the nearest book”.  Within just moments of seeing the meme we were all grabbing the nearest book and hoping it wasn’t something too embarrassing to post.  Luckily I am still reading Joe Bennett’s “A Land of Two Halves” in between academic articles.

I think there must be some perfect balance in successful memes between a low threshold of investment/participation with high return of value in the form of information sharing or community building.  Yet another thing to add to my list of things to investigate.  BTW – If you are interested in reading more about bursty behaviour in blogs, Ravi Kumar has written a few nice articles which discuss it.

Kumar, R., Novak , J., Raghavan, P., & Tomkins, A. (2004). Structure and Evolution of Blogspace. Communications of the ACM, 47(12), 35-39.

This article reports that blogs constitute a remarkable artifact of the Internet. Most people think of them as Web pages with reverse chronological sequences of dated entries, usually with sidebars of profile information and usually maintained and published with the help of a popular blog authoring tool. They tend to be quirky, highly personal, typically read by repeat visitors and interwoven into a network of tight-knit but active communities.

Kumar, R., Novak, J., Raghavan, P., & Tomkins, A. (2005). On the Bursty Evolution of Blogspace. World Wide Web, 8(2), 159-178.

We propose two new tools to address the evolution of hyperlinked corpora. First, we define time graphs to extend the traditional notion of an evolving directed graph, capturing link creation as a point phenomenon in time. Second, we develop definitions and algorithms for time-dense community tracking, to crystallize the notion of community evolution.

Meme me up Scottie

Apparently everybody has known about memes for ages, but me.  This is the first of a series of posts on memes, hopefully culminating my own.  I have done a little reading on the topic after it was introduced to me by Erika the other day.  She showed my a few examples (none of which I can find now – I need to take better notes!) and said it really helped her when conducting a research survey last year.  I can’t remember the exact numbers, but something like 642 responses in 72 hours – in other words a researchers dream!

It sounds like a meme, in the web sense of the term, is like chain mail, but people aren’t annoyed by it, are willing participate, and it is transmitted through a number of electronic means, in this case it will be via blog post and trackback.  According to wikipedia (yikes – did I just say that?!), memes are single units of cultural ideas which behave according the rules of natural selection in that they vary, mutate, compete, replicate, and propagate.

Enough of the meme primer, tomorrow let’s look at an example from my friend Erik’s blog…