The birth of a buzz, live

I've been dreaming for some time to follow on the web the birth of a buzz, and evaluate the reaction of the tools dedicated to their analysis and detection. I would have prefered better circumstances, but I was able to do it for the tragedy of the Northern Illinois University shooting two weeks ago.

The name of the gunman was not published on the evening of the drama. But 10 hours later, the Chicago Tribune provided
enough elements to guess it on their website. Of course they wrote quite hypocritically:

The Tribune is not naming the gunman because police have not officially completed the identification of his body.

A simple search for articles co-signed by Jim Thomas with the keywords "self-injury" and "prison" would identify the suspect: Steve Kazmierczak. At 8:10GMT, a visitor of the Wikipedia modifies the article about the shooting to add that name. 30 minutes later, a first blog post cites it, its author updates it many times to add other info found on the net. The name appears then in a live journal and on a forum, and at 10:33 is cited by the Daily Mail (the article has been update since). Then people start to google it a lot, and it reaches the top of the "hot trends" list. It's then cited by some splogs, which apparently make money by citing those trends sometimes with extracts of web pages about it, retrieved automatically. At 14:42, the Associated Press announces that the police gave the name: Steven Kazmierczak. I stopped following the buzz there, as articles or webpages about it then used "Steve", "Steven" or "Stephen".

Anyway, following the first hours gave me the opportunity to see how fast the web reacted. As I mentioned it, the Wikipedia first gave the name. Once more we can wonder about the ethics of the project, and note that it has become THE place to find the latest scoops. See how reactive it is to the death of a celebrity? You can even use the Wikirage tool, which put on top of its hot article list on February 13: Henri Salvador, Imad Mougniyah, et Badri Patarkatsishvili.

About the blogosphere tools, one can notice that BlogPulse isn't very responsive. Of course Google Blogsearch detects quite fast the first blogpost on the topic, in a Blogpost blog... However Blogsearch and Technorati seem to have a similar efficiency: the Technorati curve is a bit higher after 2PM because of some splogs, which Google Blogsearch didn't display (on purpose, i.e. better splog detection?).

The reaction of search engines on the "Steve Kazmierczak" request is also quite interesting. They don't detect the buzz in the first hours, except Google. Even if it's not very clear on the graph, the number of relevant results increases from 61 at 10:30 to 68 at 4PM (and those new pages deal indeed with the gunman). But this contrasts with the big rise of the total number of results, which reinforces the mystery on Google numbers. Did the number of pages for this request really double in 5 hours, or is it just a suspicious approximation?

But the most important may be in the Google Trends curves. Before the press dared to give the gunman's name, before Wikipedia learned of it, before the tabloids found out, Google knew, with the first searches on the name less than 3 hours after the shooting. Their leadership over other search engines also gives them a direct access to information, and their tools are ready to treat this as much as they can. With geolocation in particular, to determine the origin of requests, and maybe identify a local buzz. So when will Google launch a press agency or a tabloid, to uncover scoops and rumors hours before the Daily Mail? And who can access those Google Trends data live today? On the website, the curves are currently updated after 48 hours, not available for words not searched enough, the horizontal scale is not explained (I'm guessing that the 4AM dot represents the number of searches from 3AM to 4AM but I may be wrong), without even mentioning the lack of a vertical scale! A Google Trends API may give the possibility to access this data, and give back to the internauts the knowledge learned from them.


This post was originally published in French: Suivi en direct de la naissance d'un buzz.
The data I gathered and used for the graphs (OpenOffice Spreadsheet file)

What does veronising mean?

Well, to get some idea of what veronising is, maybe you should check Jean Veronis's blog. My definition would be "to design and publish on a blog programs or methods able to help analyzing data". Jean has created a whole bunch of useful tools, which work mainly on texts (he is a researcher in natural language processing) or internet corpuses (search engines results for example). Among the most impressive, the Nébuloscope, which makes tag clouds out of words appearing frequently in the results of a search engine request, or the Chronologue, which used to draw the evolution of a keyword use on the internet (it used the "date" function of a search engin which has now disappeared).

Inspired by his impressive results, I've started to analyze data I find interesting myself, and program some little tools to help me do that. I may translate some of my previous posts, here are some topics I've worked on, I put the links to French posts until they are translated to English.

Phylogenetic trees are used to represent the evolution of species, based on the idea that some species close to each other will appear in a same subtree, and a lot of algorithms exist to build them from biology data. But phylogenetic trees are also an excellent mean of visualizing data, and I've tried building the trees of country votes at the Eurovision song contest, French "députés" (our congressmen) according to their proximity of votes (as well as a DNA chip visualization of those votes), and more recently I've been working on building what I call a "tree cloud" from a text, the same idea than a tag cloud except the order of the words is not alphabetical, but they are displayed as leaves of a tree. Until the program is finished, I still rely on tag clouds (with nice colors and a logarithmic scale, pleaaase, not those ugly and unexpressive ones we often find on the internet !). I've tried using them to analyze one's writing style (with instant messaging logs) or speaking style (with the planned version and the pronounced version of a press conference talk by President Sarkozy).
I like doing some search engine statistics, to help spelling, visualize and date the birth of the web, or send massive requests to compare popularity of people or concepts. Those stats analyzes often make critical use of spreadsheet programs, which also helped me to track the evolution of a petition, which gave me a glance on the time of the day people connect to the internet depending on their job (students, teachers, engineers...). I could also get nice synthesis pictures of French polls before the first round of the presidential election, in 2002 and 2007. I'm very interested in informative and original visualizations, like Voronoi diagrams (for McDonald's restaurants in Paris) or metro map views (building them from a genuine metro map is a GI-complete problem).

I have also analyzed a blog meme last year, the "Z-list", which in France appeared as "la F-list". Even if I did not publish my data on the "Z-list", I still have the files, as well as the "infection tree", on my computer somewhere. This year I've created a little utility, the "CaptuCourbe", to put data from the picture of a curve into a spreadsheet file (some "unscan" programs do this but they are quite complicated to use, or expensive), which helps comparing the evolution of a buzz on many buzz tracking systems (Google Trends, Technorati, site stats systems...). Currently the program is in French only, but Jean motivated me to translate it to English, which will soon be done.

And you will never guess the topic of my most visited blog post, which I'm not the most proud of: I had noticed a bug on some French TV channel website which gave access to the channel live on the internet. It lasted about 3 days, but since then Google sends me all people who want to watch "M6" on the web. I've put links to other French channels which can be viewed free anyway, to avoid frustration.

See you soon for some new computer-powered experimentations!