Analysis of Social MediaMLD 10-802 aka LTI 11-772

William Cohen (MLD) wcohen@cs.cmu.edu

Natalie Glance (Google) nglance@gmail.com

8-28-07

Agenda

• Introductions– William– Natalie– …

• Meeting times and grading– One meeting/week– Class participation (we’re a seminar!)– Present paper(s)

• Some comments about the course…

What is social media?

• Media developed collaboratively by a community– Examples:

• Proc of the 23rd Intl Conf on Machine Learning • Wikipedia• YouTube• Blogosphere• WWW

– Characteristics:• Decreasing cost and/or relative difficulty of participation

many more participants• Many participants decentralized editorial process• Many participants rapid changes over time

• O(1) editor

• O(1) reviewer

• O(1) author

• O(1) editors (PC)

• O(10) SPCs

• O(100) reviewers

• O(1000) authors

• many contributors

• editors & a consistent style

What is social media?

• Media developed collaboratively by a community– Examples:

• Proc of the 23rd Intl Conf on Machine Learning • Wikipedia• YouTube• Blogosphere• WWW

– Characteristics:• Decreasing cost and/or relative difficulty of participation

many more participants• Many participants decentralized editorial process• Many participants rapid changes over time

Why study social media?

• Change or spike?

• Open-source was a real change in how software is developed

• Will there be a real change in how knowledge is developed and transmitted?

Socialweb.hcireseach.org – a socialogists versionOf this course -?

What is social media?

• Media developed collaboratively by a community– Examples:

• Proc of the 23rd Intl Conf on Machine Learning • Wikipedia• YouTube• Blogosphere• WWW

– Characteristics:• Decreasing cost and/or relative difficulty of participation

many more participants• Many participants decentralized editorial process• Many participants rapid changes over time

Editorial control/uniform look and feel links between different blogs

1. DailyKOS

2. BoingBoing

3. LiveJournal community

4. Reciprocally linked blogs (blue) around Michelle Malkin

5. Porn

6. Sports

Visualization from Matt Hurst (Microsoft LiveLabs):

What is social media?• Media developed collaboratively by a community

– Characteristics:• Decreasing cost and/or relative difficulty of participation many

more participants• Many participants decentralized editorial process• Many participants rapid changes over time

– Some research questions:• Who are the members of the community?

– Author identification from text, predicting sex, location, and other demographics from text, identifying entities in “anonymized” networks, …

• Which members are most influential?– PageRank, models of viral marketing, predicting citation

influence, …• What are they collectively saying?

– Sentiment analysis, aggregating opinions, trend analysis, predicting political affiliation, …

Immediate plan

• Students: – make sure I have your email– look over reading list and think about what you’d like

to present and when

• Next Tuesday: – some technical background on sentiment analysis,

maybe link prediction, from William and/or Natalie– readings for Tuesday to be announced by end of the

week– office hours TBA