Microblogs

A research project by John Conroy, a Masters student supervised by Josephine Griffith at NUI Galway, has gathered some interesting statistics on Twitter usage and the most tweeted users in Ireland (during February / March 2010).

The study acquired 307,168 tweets from a group of Irish Twitter users. These tweets yielded 93,022 resolvable replies (@someuser), and another 7,298 retweets. Therefore, a third of the tweets investigated contained either a reply to another user or a retweet. Of the 93,022 resolvable replies, the vast majority were directed at users external to the Irish group. 15,364 replies (16.5%) were directed at an Irish user, and 77,658 (83.5%) at a user outside of Ireland. (Just over 2,000 investigated tokens were spoiled, often due to typos or e-mail addresses being detected as replies.)

It was as lovely morning as one could find on the west coast of Ireland where I found myself sitting in my car on the streets of the lovely city of Galway. But my specific location is irrelevant. What I’m about to say probably applies to any place with more than two streets. End of caveat, moving on:

My enjoyment of the new day’s splendour was marred only by the fact that like so many other things in my car recently my music system was kaput. I was out on an errand at an unusual time for me and I found myself in a pretty nasty traffic jam. “Bugger,” was something like the word I used to describe my predicament. As I sat there quietly going nowhere fast, novel and interesting ideas started to bubble up in my mind as there wont to do when said mind is not required for its normal assignments.

It's not just social media mavens or gurus who have high follower counts on Twitter these days. Twitter now has its fair share of celebrity twitterers or tweeple with many, many followers (in fact, the first result from Google when you search for twitterer is none other than actor and writer Wil Wheaton, or @wilw on Twitter).

Cork will play host to the 5th International Conference on Social Software - BlogTalk - from the 2nd to the 4th of March 2008.

The BlogTalk event – see 2008.blogtalk.net - allows practitioners, developers and academics to connect and discuss the latest trends and happenings in the world of social software (blogs, wikis, social networks, etc.). A workshop on the hot topic of "Social Network Portability" will be co-located with the event.

BlogTalk has attracted prominent speakers in the past, and this year is no exception.

It must be acquisition season: Google yesterday announced that they have acquired microblogging service Jaiku.