Image created by Steven not the Pew Report

Jesse Holcomb of PEJ, Kim Gross of George Washington University and Amy Mitchell of PEJ

For nearly every news organization, Twitter has become a regular part of the daily news outreach. But there are questions about how those organizations actually use the technology: How often do they tweet? What kind of news do they distribute? To what extent is Twitter used as a new reporting tool or as a mechanism for gathering insights from followers?

To answer some of these questions, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and The George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs collaborated on a study of Twitter feeds from 13 major news organizations.

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Journalists and news outlets on Twitter ranked according to Portland’s ‘Newstweet Index’ for the third quarter of 2011.

Top 50 media tweeters

The stories behind the iconic images of the Arab uprisings as told by those who filmed them.

“The people of Tunisia created their own media tools with their mobile phones and small cameras. They succeeded in publicising their cause and tragedy to the entire world. Those amateur images became like a

“I think today the world is asking for a real alternative. Would you like to live in a world where the only alternative is either anglo-saxon neoliberalism or Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values?

I claim if we do nothing we will gradually approach a kind of a new type of authoritarian

http://www.newscientist.com/mobile/article/mg21228354.500-revealed–the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html

an interesting article that applies social network analysis to ownership data.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

Each circle is a website or blog. The size of the circle indicates the centrality or ‘importance’ of the website in the exchange or flow of ideas and interests.

The lines between the circles are hyperlinks between the sites. The thicker the line, the stronger and more valued the link.

When a line turns red it means the link has been removed. When a line is green it means that a link has been created.

So if a site moves from the edge towards the centre it has gained in control of the flow of ideas and interests for that period.

As it stands it contains the top 200 sites and this is expected to change substantially in the final data collection period.

And here is a different version of the same data:

And finally from the same project the Twitter Accounts Related to Leeds on Saturday 18th of June 2011:

This is one snap shot of 35,000 (approx) twitter accounts related to Leeds, UK. Again it is part of a dry run for a project that I am working on with colleagues from the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds.

Each circle is one twitter account and the grey lines between them means that they are following, being followed, replied directly to or retweeted by the other.

The size of the circle indicates the betweenness centrality score for that twitter account.

Brian Solis and JESS3 created a visual depiction of the, what they call, Twitterverse (as in universe actually). The graphics shows loads of twitter apps neatly ordered and lined up on concentric rings of types. These range form Geographics like trendsmap to rich media like yFrog, to mobile apps like echofone, to twitter search like twazzup.

Click here for an interactive version.

by David Schuff, Temple University,Ozgur Turetken, Ryerson University and Asif Zaheeruddin, Institute of Business Administration Karachi.

Abstract

Web 2.0 has great potential to serve as a public sphere (Habermas, 1974; Habermas, 1989) – a distributed arena of voices where all who want to do so can participate. A well-functioning public sphere is important for pluralistic decision-making at many levels, ranging from small organizations to society at large. In this paper, we analyze the capability of the blogosphere in its current form to support such a role. This analysis leads to the identification of the principal issues that prevent the blogosphere from realizing its full potential as a public sphere. Most significantly, we propose that the sheer volume of content overwhelms blog readers, forcing them to restrict themselves to only a small subset of valuable content. This ultimately reduces their level of informedness. Based on past research on managing discourse, we propose four design artifacts that would alleviate these issues: a communal repository, textual clustering, visual cues, and a participation facility for blog users. We present a prototype system, called FeedWiz, which implements several of these design artifacts. Based on this initial design, we formulate a research agenda for the creation of new tools that effectively harness the potential of the growing body of user-generated content in the blogosphere and beyond.

link to the full paper…

The data is from a series of issuecrawls conducted on the Brazilian presidential elections from July 2010 to September 2010. Its a small sample.

The size and central position of a node-site represents the betweenness centrality score. The thickness of a link and arrow represent the strength of the link. Green lines show the appearance of new hyperlinks between existing sites and red lines denote the disappearance of a link.