Who Wouldn’t Like a #MW2009 Wordle?
Posted in Presentism, Technology on 04. May, 2009
Wordles made up of the last 1500 twitter sends with the #mw2009 hashtag.
Use of #mw2009 by twitter user.
Words used in last 1500 #mw2009 tweets
Wordles made by Kate Haley Goldman.
What can we conclude from this? Not a great deal.
If you filter out the Twitter usernames, and obvious words like “museum” and “presentation”, you can pick out a few themes:
* tagging
* APIs / API
* open
* participation
* share
* physical [museum]
* virtual
* flickr
* community
* mobile
* game
Do these accurately some up the things that museums are currently doing and thinking about online? Perhaps, but not exhaustively. And there’s nothing particularly ‘new’ in this list – maybe the innovation is settling down, and people are more concerned with getting on and producing stuff?
Well, you could conclude that there was nothing new being said on the MW2009 backchannel, but I’m not that cynical.
You could say that there is a particular size that are “fringe”/avant guard thinking this year and next year they could be the same size as where social is now.
So, Game, API and GPS could be ones to look out for.
OR… innovation is becoming more of a paradigm shift than a technological one.
It’s true, it’s more visual than useful. Unfortunately I don’t have NUDist here, or I’d run the data through that. (Lynda Kelly? Anyone else? Anybody?)
I think there are a few interesting notions though. MW twitter participation was much higher than the trad. 90-9-1. Though this data is incomplete (only 1500 tweets) out of the conference attendees, there was 50% who didn’t twitter, 48% who were occasional contributors and the top 10 contributors (responsible for 2% or more of total tweets) made up 36% of the tweeting. So it looked something like 50-48-2.
AAM this week by contrast looks nothing like that.
Trying to get a sense of authorities or hubs through just the tweets is a bit misleading too (Peter Samis in the wordle, for example.)
Even we were we to run this through NUDist, you’d only see the smoke, not necessarily the ideas. For instance ArtBabble and Brooklyn are both here, but not necessarily the ideas that each represents. So we’d see affirmation of Click and Tag! You’re it! as exemplary projects, but not necessarily what we value in these projects. For that sort of idea-mining, forum analysis is better than conference tweets.
Plus these wordles totally miss the social aspect, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to analyze that. Though the word “bar” doesn’t appear here, even such idea-full twitter-heavy folks that we had there still used twitter to encourage and reinforce our social identity and sense of community.
Perhaps still worth doing the formal content analysis on…….
…I just thought it was pretty.