Text Analytics Summit

I'll be speaking at the Text Analytics Summit (June 16th, 17th in Boston). The idea for the talk is as follows:

• Examine what I consider to be the two pillars of social media analysis: subjectivity (content) and authority/influence (structure). I have a story that pulls these two together.
• Characterize the current model for most social media analysis products (the consumer versus the consumed) and describe what I think will (or ought!) to be the next model for analysis in this space. The basic idea is that a) the producers of stuff shouldn't just be interested in the point of consumption, but in the entire ecology surrounding their product space, b) if you look hard enough you can aggregate the voices of many participants in production of goods and services.

Comments

[Benedikt]

Content and structure definitely are very important points when it comes to social media analysis. But I'd include a third point: dynamics. When you look at the ways memes spread through the social web (cf. this paper: http://technobabble2dot0.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/edelman-white-paper-distributed-influence-quantifying-the-impact-of-social-media.pdf), there are a) meme starters, b) meme spreaders, c) meme adapters, d) meme commentators and e) meme readers. This means breathing some life into the social media networks and could be a connection between content and structure.

[Matthew Hurst]

Benedikt - thanks for the comment. I agree with you - my intention in the above description was to really characterize the data types (and here I used examples up front of what you can do with them). However, I will certainly reword this to capture the issue of dynamics (which, as you know, I've been interested in from the get go with things like the graphs in BlogPulse).