Microblogs, microblogging

Unlike traditional mass media, peer interaction between individuals is of critical importance in the dissemination mechanisms for social media. There is emerging interest in the possible novel application of social media in disseminating public health information or messages. In this paper, we analyze tweet and re-tweet behaviour in the context of Australian public health-related micro-blog posts to provide preliminary insights into the characteristics of widely disseminated tweets (including characteristics of re-tweeting accounts). In this way we also consider the nature and role of human computer-mediated interactions in affecting the level of dissemination of Twitter-based public health messages.

In this report, we are delving into the world of 140 characters: microblogging. This fascinating
world is constantly changing and evolving into something more complex. Nobody
can see where it will take us yet, but for many, Twitter is only the tip of an iceberg, a
gateway to something unknown as DOS was to the Windows. While the world is still
contemplating its possible future, many researchers took a hands-on approach, writing
influential papers on Twitter.
More than just mentioning those papers, we are giving the basics of microblogging,
explaining Twitter.com to details, saving you from the trouble of connecting thousands
of dots on Internet with this report.
It was both breathtaking and intimidating to read and record all articles and papers
on Twitter and microblogging. It was breathtaking, because of the influence of microblogging
in many fields ranging from news reporting to alert systems and education. It is
intimidating as well, because almost all sources are volatile. For the report, we had to
mention many online blogs, newspaper articles but they might disappear or be moved on
Web. We do not see this as a shortcoming in the report; as the very name of Twitter
comes from chirping sounds of birds, it is only fitting that our sources, just like those
chirping sounds, would be a part of our world for a short time and disappear, leaving us
with new notions, like ambient intimacy.
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The aim of this chapter is to show some basic methods using R to analyze text content to discover emergent issues and  controversies in diverse corpora. As a specific case study, I
investigate the culture of microblogging academics within the dynamics of a professional conference to gain insights into the key issues and debates emergent in this community
and the transformative effects of using Twitter in academic contexts. Microblogging academics can be considered a type of online community which has its own norms, rules,
and communicative behaviors (Gruzd et al., 2011) that can be analyzed with anthropological methods (cf. Boellstorff, 2011; Wilson and Peterson, 2002). My hypothesis is that data mining the publically available microblog text content generated in relation to the 109th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in November 2011 can reveal the main issues and controversies that characterized the event as well as the community structure of the people generating the corpus. Although the duration of the meeting represents a narrow slice of Twitter content, it is ideal for looking at which academics are tweeting and why they tweet because academic meetings are a period of highly concentrated intellectual and social activity within the academic community. It is during these times that the distinctive patterns of shared learned knowledge, behaviors, and beliefs that characterize communities are most apparent (Egri, 1992). It is hoped that the methods presented will be suitable for the analysis of a wide variety of communities that generate large amounts of text content.

Blogs and microblogs are used for communication, knowledge management, and publishing. Blog is simply a shortened version of weblog, a coinage of “web” and “log,” representing an information system that lists diary entries online. Microblogs can be seen as consisting of shorter blog entries. This entry further defines microblogs, then discusses the process of microblogging and how it functions as a means of mass communication.

This article will demonstrate how the notion of 'phatic communion' has become an increasingly significant part of digital media culture alongside the rise of online networking practices. Through a consideration of the new media objects of blogs, social networking profiles and microblogs, along with their associated practices, I will argue, that the social contexts of 'individualization' and 'network sociality', alongside the technological developments associated with pervasive communication and 'connected presence' has led to an online media culture increasingly dominated by phatic communications. That is, communications which have purely social (networking) and not informational or dialogic intents. I conclude with a discussion of the potential nihilistic consequences of such a culture.


Key Words: blogging • database culture • microblogging • network sociality • phatic • post-social • social networking

The  paper  describes  a  teaching  innovation  experience  consisting  in  the  use  of  Twitter  as  a  learning  tool.  The  students  are  registered  in  a  course  on  Spanish  tort  law,  where  they  basically  learn  the  structure  of  functioning  of  rules  of  compensation  for  accidents  caused  by  risky  activities.  Therefore,  it  is  essential  that  concepts  like  risk  are  studied  and  analysed,  since  the  presence  of  risk  usually  entails  that  a  special  rule  of  liability  is  applied.  The  students  are  expected  to  learn  what  instances  of  liability  based  on  risk  exist  at  the  present  time  under  Spanish  law.  However,  there  may  also  be  some  instances  where  liability  is  not  established  by  the  legislature  and,  in  spite  of  that,  one  could  consider  as  appropriate  that  liability  is  based  on  risk  as  well.  The  main  consequence  which  derives  from  this  basic  question  is  that  liability  may  be  imposed  on  the  liable  person  irrespective  of  whether  he  or  she  behaved  in  a  negligent  way.

Despite censorship, Chinese bloggers routinely uncover corruption, help solve social problems, and even pressure state officials to change foreign policy. The power of online opinion is undisputed in individual cases, but the overall effect of blog discourse on the Chinese polity is unclear. Do blogs act as a social “safety valve” forestalling systemic change by allowing troublemakers to vent their frustrations, or do they resemble a “pressure cooker,” inspiring action offline by groups of like-minded activists? Using a large-scale content analysis and small-scale case studies, I argue that blogs can serve as a “safety valve” on issues where newspapers and the mainstream media set the agenda, and a “pressure cooker” on issues where bloggers get ahead of journalists.

This chapter seeks to show how the society of the digital swarm we live in has changed the way individuals
behave to the point that we have become Homo digitalis. These changes occur with information
privatization, meaning that not only are we passive consumers, but we are also producers and issuers of
digital communication. The overarching argument of this reflection is the disappearance of the “reality
principle” in the political, economic, and social spheres. This text highlights that the loss of the reality
principle is the effect of microblogging as a digital practice, the uses of which can either impoverish
the space of people’s experience to undermine the public space or achieve the mobilization of citizens
against of the censorship of the traditional means of communication by authoritarian political regimes,
such as the case of the Arab Spring in 2011.

https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/pbns.260/main
This volume examines the language of microblogs drawing on the example of a group of eleven users who are united by their interest in ballet as a physical activity and an art form. The book reports on a three and a half year study which complemented a 20,000 word corpus of tweets with semi-structured interviews and participant observation. It deals with two main questions: how users exploit the linguistic resources at their disposal to build a certain identity, and how the community boundaries are performed discursively. The focus is on the speech acts of self-praise and complaint, and on the storytelling practices of mi-crobloggers. The comprehensive treatment of the speech act theory and the social psychological approaches to self-disclosure provides a stepping stone to the analysis of identity work, for which the users draw on two distinctive interpretive repertoires – affiliative and self-promoting.

This study examines how mainstream journalists who microblog negotiate their professional norms and practices in a new media format that directly challenges them. Through a content analysis of more than 22,000 of their tweets (postings) on the microblog platform Twitter, this study reveals that the journalists more freely express opinions, a common microblogging practice but one which contests the journalistic norm of objectivity (impartiality and nonpartisanship). To a lesser extent, the journalists also adopted two other norm-related microblogging features: providing accountability and transparency regarding how they conduct their work, and sharing user-generated content with their followers. The journalists working for national newspapers, national television news divisions, and cable news networks were less inclined in their tweets than their counterparts working for less “elite” news outlets, to relinquish their gatekeeping role by sharing their stage with other news gatherers and commentators, or to provide accountability and transparency by providing information about their jobs, engaging in discussions with other tweeters, writing about their personal lives, or linking to external websites.

El estudio  valora  las actitudes y el uso que hacen los docentes de primaria de la aplicación Edmodo.  La muestra  de 51 maestros de 6 países  aporta información en un cuestionario mixto. Se lleva a cabo un análisis de los mensajes de los 5 grupos estudiados.  Se concluye que la  utilización de Edmodo que hacen los docentes  es  muy positiva  debido a numerosas ventajas colaborativas centradas en una comunicación y trabajo en proyectos


The study assesses the attitudes and the use of Edmodo by primary school teachers. The sample of the study is 51 teachers from 6 countries, which provides information in a mixed  questionnaire.  An analysis of the messages of the 5 groups studied  is carried out. It is concluded that  the use  of Edmodo  by  teachers  is  very positive due to numerous  collaborative  advantages centered  on  communication and project  based
learning

Different forms of regulation explain that China processes the most sophisticated internet monitoring system. Meanwhile, the contribution of communication technology - social media - provides new possibilities for Chinese users to exchange information and express opinions. This phenomenon gives rise to discussions on the following question: to what extend does social media influence the online willingness to speak out in China, which is an ideal example to examine the online expression of opinion under the internet governance.
471 users of Sina Weibo, which is the most popular and influential microblog in China, were enrolled with a snowball sampling method and answered online questionnaires. The results indicate that: 1). Chinese social media users have less fear of isolation and more willingness to speak out on Weibo than that offline; 2). Neither current nor future congruency between personal opinion and perceived public opinion climate relate to willingness to speak out offline and on Weibo; 3). Fear of isolation plays as an negative predictor of spiral of silence theory only works offline, but not on Weibo; 4). The willingness to express opinion offline and on Weibo related to each other positively; 5). Register with real name presented more willingness to express on Weibo. This study also examined and discussed the spiral of silence theory in China and under an online Constance.

Over the last few years, microblogging has gained prominence as a form of personal broadcasting media where information and opinion are mixed together without an established order, usually tightly linked with current reality. Location awareness and promptness provide researchers using the Internet with the opportunity to create “psychological landscapes"—that is, to detect differences and changes in voiced (twittered) emotions, cognitions, and behaviors. In our article, we present iScience Maps, a free Web service for researchers, available from http://maps.iscience.deusto.es/ and http://tweet miner.eu/. Technologically, the service is based on Twitter's streaming and search application programming interfaces (APIs), accessed through several PHP libraries, and a Java- Script frontend. This service allows researchers to assess via Twitter the effect of specific events in different places as they are happening and to make comparisons between cities, regions, or countries regarding psychological states and their evolution in the course of an event. In a step-by-step example, it is shown how to replicate a study on affective and personality characteristics inferred from first names (Mehrabian & Piercy, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 755–758 1993) by mining Twitter data with iScience Maps. Results from the original study are replicated in both world regions we tested (the western U.S.and the U.K.); we also discover base rate of names to be a confound that needs to be controlled for in future research.

Through web sites such as Twitter, micro-blogging has shown a remarkable growth, demonstrating the human desire to share and consume information and knowledge. At the same time, the capabilities of mobile devices such as smart phones has considerably increased, opening up new ways to communicate and share content. In particular it is becoming feasible that mobile devices can directly share content such as micro-blogs without Internet infrastructure. This offers advantages in terms of scalability, and for micro-blogs in particular, it offers the potential to provide content relevant to the end user without explicit subscriptions. To facilitate this, we propose a totally decentralised push-based scheme for intelligent micro-blogging from mobile devices based on opportunistic networking. This is achieved through mobile devices building interest profiles relevant to communities induced by frequent social interactions. These interest profiles allow the devices to prioritise forwarding the micro-blog payloads that maximise the utility received by others. Detailed simulation studies determine the parameters that affect system performance and demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms basic dissemination strategies in terms of the relevance of the received information.

Mak, B. C. N., & Chui, H. L. (2014a). Impoliteness in Facebook Status Updates: Strategic talk among colleagues "outside" the workplace. Text & Talk, 34(2), 165-185. ISSN: 1860-7349. (Indexed in SSCI, Clarivate Analytics)

This paper examines how colleagues of an Italian restaurant in Hong Kong perform core business and relation-based talk in Facebook Status Updates beyond working hours and outside the workplace. Adapting Wenger's (1998) framework of Communities of Practice and Culpeper's (1996) model of impoliteness, we particularly concentrate on how they employ impoliteness strategies to get things done, and how power is negotiated in the three mechanisms of doing power as suggested in Wodak et al. (2012). Based on the analysis of 200 Status Updates collected from the research site, we find that such colleagues' talk outside the workplace can be conducive (or at least influential) to professional tasks and their relationships in the workplace. As our participants infuse their impoliteness strategies with Netspeak, they tend to employ the impoliteness strategies of "disassociating from others," "being unsympathetic," and "not treating others seriously." Simultaneously, their impolite participation displays a tendency to challenge or subvert institutional authority and official status, typically by some normative mechanisms of doing power. We argue that Status Updates blur the line between "in the workplace" and "outside the workplace," and that they become an alternative collocation of workplace talk which allows repositioning of work matters and renegotiation of power by impoliteness strategies.

El presente artículo describe una investigación realizada sobre la plataforma Edmodo. El estudio se lleva a cabo en el curso 2011 2012 en un centro de educación de adultos. Es por tanto un estudio de caso que analiza las valoraciones que 52 estudiantes proporcionan en un cuestionario mixto y los mensajes que enviaron a la plataforma. Los datos se analizan estadísticamente tanto descriptivamente como mediante un contraste de medias. Se concluye que esta herramienta propicia una mejora en las actividades, facilita el acceso al material, potencia la comunicación, desarrolla actitudes positivas y potencia la motivación

We present a system to normalize Spanish tweets, which uses preprocessing rules, a domain-appropriate edit-distance model, and language models to select correction candidates based on context. The system’s results at SEPLN 2013 Tweet-Norm task were above-average.

"According to the Standish Group (2011), 66% of projects fail, while 75% of the successful ones are managed by experienced project managers (PM). These PMs document their experience in the form of stories to facilitate knowledge capture (Jonassen and Hernandez-Serrano, 2002); however, while 62.4% of the organizations have
formal procedures for documenting lessons learned (LL), 89.3% of the organizations are not doing so (Williams, 2008). The problem, therefore, is how to facilitate the capture of project knowledge from the experienced PMs and transfer it to the novice PMs. A new information and communication technology (ICT) called microblogging is an effective tool for capturing and disseminating usage practices (Zhang, Qu, Cody and Wu, 2010); however, it has not been studied yet for the purpose of capturing and transferring project knowledge in organizations. This paper proposes research to validate whether microblogging is a useful platform for knowledge creation of LL in projects."

Micro-blogging platforms have been used increasingly by multinational companies as a marketing
tool. Global corporations utilize platforms such as Twitter and Weio, leading micro-blogging sites,
and promote their brand equity and increase engagement with their customers. The question is whether
they use these platforms strategically, localizing the content and the structure to meet the needs of
their target population. This study uses case study content analysis to begin answering this question.
Starbucks posts over a one-month period on Twitter in the U.S. and on Sina Weibo in China were
analyzed using three existing validated frameworks: descriptive analysis, content classification, and
content customization. The results indicate that Starbucks somewhat localizes its posts to its Chinese
consumers, in terms of content, symbols, values, and offerings. In terms of descriptive analysis, the
study found that Starbucks underutilizes its Sina Weibo site compared to its Twitter site; posts more
community-related information on Sina Weibo than on Twitter; and provides more action-related
information on Twitter than on Weibo. This paper goes on to suggest micro-blogging strategies for
multinational companies in the Managerial Implications section and concludes with a discussion on
the direction of future research for scholars in this field.

Micro-blogging platforms have been used increasingly by multinational companies as a marketing
tool. Global corporations utilize platforms such as Twitter and Weio, leading micro-blogging sites,
and promote their brand equity and increase engagement with their customers. The question is whether
they use these platforms strategically, localizing the content and the structure to meet the needs of
their target population. This study uses case study content analysis to begin answering this question.
Starbucks posts over a one-month period on Twitter in the U.S. and on Sina Weibo in China were
analyzed using three existing validated frameworks: descriptive analysis, content classification, and
content customization. The results indicate that Starbucks somewhat localizes its posts to its Chinese
consumers, in terms of content, symbols, values, and offerings. In terms of descriptive analysis, the
study found that Starbucks underutilizes its Sina Weibo site compared to its Twitter site; posts more
community-related information on Sina Weibo than on Twitter; and provides more action-related
information on Twitter than on Weibo. This paper goes on to suggest micro-blogging strategies for
multinational companies in the Managerial Implications section and concludes with a discussion on
the direction of future research for scholars in this field.

This paper presents a multilingual study on, per single post of microblog text, (a) how much can be said, (b) how much is written in terms of characters and bytes, and (c) how much is said in terms of information content in posts by different organizations in different languages. Focusing on three different languages (English, Chinese and Japanese), this research analyses Weibo and Twitter accounts of major embassies and news agencies. We first establish our criterion for quantifying ``how much can be said'' in a digital text based on the openly available Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the translated subtitles from TED talks. These parallel corpora allow us to determine the number of characters and bits needed to represent the same content in different languages and character encodings. We then derive the amount of information that is actually contained in microblog posts authored by selected accounts on Weibo and Twitter. Our results confirm that languages with larger character sets such as Chinese and Japanese contain more information per character than English, but the actual information content contained within a microblog text varies depending on both the type of organization and the language of the post. We conclude with a discussion on the design implications of microblog text limits for different languages.

This paper presents a system to normalize Spanish tweets, which uses preprocessing rules, a domain-appropriate edit-distance model, and language models to select correction candidates based on context. The system is an improvement on the tool we submitted to the Tweet-Norm 2013 shared task, and results on the task’s test-corpus are above-average. Additionally, we provide a study of the impact for tweet normalization of the different components of the system: rule-based, edit-distance based and statistical.

There is an abundance of information found on microblog services due to their popularity. However the potential of this trove of information is limited by the lack of effective means for users to browse and interpret the numerous messages found on these services. We tackle this problem using a two-step process, first by slicing up the search results of current retrieval systems along multiple possible genres. Then, a summary is generated from the microblog messages attributed to each genre. We believe this helps users to better understand the possible interpretations of the retrieved results and aid them in finding the information that they need. Our novel approach makes use of automatically acquired information from external search engines in each of these two steps. We first integrate this information with a semi-supervised probabilistic graphical model, and show that this helps us to achieve significantly better classification performance without the need for much training data. Next we incorporate the extra information into graph-based summarization, and demonstrate that superior summaries (up to 30% improvement in ROUGE-1) are obtained.

Analysis of information retrieved from microblogging services such as Twitter can provide valuable insight into public sentiment in a geographic region. This insight can be enriched by visualising information in its geographic context. Two underlying approaches for sentiment analysis are dictionary-based and machine learning. The former is popular for public sentiment analysis, and the latter has found limited use for aggregating public sentiment from Twitter data. The research presented in this paper aims to extend the machine learning approach for aggregating public sentiment. To this end, a framework for analysing and visualising public sentiment from a Twitter corpus is developed. A dictionary-based approach and a machine learning approach are implemented within the framework and compared using one UK case study, namely the royal birth of 2013. The case study validates the feasibility of the framework for analysis and rapid visualisation. One observation is that there is good correlation between the results produced by the popular dictionary-based approach and the machine learning approach when large volumes of tweets are analysed. However, for rapid analysis to be possible faster methods need to be developed using big data techniques and parallel methods.

This paper examines the community formed by the Twitter users that used a city-level hashtag. In particular, we provide a network perspective of the city of Athens, Greece, as demonstrated by the analysis and visualization of the relevant Twitter hashtag data, in order to present both an overview and deeper insights at the microblogging practices of this geographic local network. Further analysis suggests that the Twitter community defined by the members of the network shows strong signs of a real-life community.

Microblogging services are considered an emerging opportunity for authorities seeking to establish new communication channels with their public. Potential benefits evolve around enhancing transparency and interactivity, as well as sharing information regularly or during emergency events. The purpose of this exploratory study is to advance our empirical understanding of microblogging in local government. In particular, we reflect on online data collected to profile the use of Twitter by 29 Greater London local authorities (LAs). The study shows that London LAs have been accumulating significant experience with Twitter mainly over the past two years. In fact, many of them appear to incorporate conversational characteristics in their Tweets other than simply disseminating information. Furthermore, an analysis of Tweets during the August 2011 riots in England indicates the usefulness of the medium for responsibly informing the public and preventing rumours. Nevertheless, the study also identifies several points of improvement in the way public authorities are building their online networks; for example, in terms of connecting with each other and exploiting even more the conversational characteristics of Twitter.

Este trabalho objetiva analisar a multiplicidade discursiva identificada na escrita de blogs e microblogs de alunos de inglês do SENAC-RN, em Natal, e do CENEX-FALE/UFMG, em Belo Horizonte, respectivamente. Considerando as noções de dialogismo e polifonia de Bakhtin (1981; 2006), entendemos que o discurso se faz por uma míriade de vozes e é construído na relação entre sujeitos, que se constituem como "eu" na dinâmica discursiva que estabelecem com o "outro". O sujeito discursivo fala de mais de uma posição, e se vê cercado por outros discursos. Efetivamente, seu discurso é marcado por sua voz, mas essa voz vem de um sujeito múltiplo (Fischer, 2001), tornando-se múltipla também. Com base nessas considerações teóricas, analisamos textos produzidos em blogs e microblogs durante um semestre letivo, nos quais identificamos diferentes movimentos de polifonia discursiva: os alunos começam sua prática de escrita digital no lugar de alunos, identificando-se de acordo, trazendo à tona um discurso marcado por seu fazer pedagógico de aprendiz de inglês. Com o tempo, percebemos a emergência de outras vozes. Ainda que temporariamente, os alunos abandonam a posição inicial de sujeitos aprendizes de inglês e passam a falar de outros lugares – como estudantes universitários, trabalhadores, namorados, filhos, indivíduos. Nos blogs, talvez por constituírem um gênero discursivo propício à escrita de si, em que há pouca limitação de espaço e assunto (Komesu, 2005; Marcuschi, 2005), notamos alguns textos mais carregados de subjetividade, em outros foi o viés argumentativo que configurou a prática escrita.  Nos microblogs, por sua vez, foi a crescente interatividade entre os alunos que nos chamou mais atenção. Concluímos, assim, que ainda que não consigam se expressar fluentemente na segunda língua, os aprendizes demonstraram facilidade em marcar suas várias posições discursivas nos textos, inclusive nas escolhas lexicais e no estilo de escrita adotados.

Microblogging allows users to offer interpersonal bonds to an ambient audience of followers. One way of sharing a bond via Twitter, a popular microblogging service, is by ‘retweeting’, that is re-publishing a post within your own Twitter stream. This chapter explores the relationship between if-then contingency patterns and retweeting practices. Using a 100 million word corpus of tweets I investigate the role of contingency in the way interpersonal bonds are proposed. RT, the initialism for retweet, is a frequent collocate of IF in this corpus. Invitations to retweet a post (e.g. RT this if you love Justin Bieber) are calls to re-share a bond, where we understand a bond to be a ‘coupling’ (Zhao, 2010) of evaluative and ideational meaning. Drawing upon Appraisal Theory (Martin and White, 2005) a model of evaluative language, I investigate how coherence relations in the form of conditionals co-pattern with couplings. Strategies for establishing alignment with particular personae holding particular values are considered in two domains of experience. The first is celebration of the celebrity, Justin Bieber, characterized by a frequent call to retweet a post if you share positive appreciation and affect targeted at this singer. The second domain is more domestic: quotidian complaints about everyday annoyances such as being caught behind someone who is walking too slowly. In the latter case, the call to retweet centers upon implicit judgement of normality expressed through negative affect, with users invited to retweet if they share this commonplace frustration.

Zappavigna, M (2013). ‘If You Do It Too Then RT And Say #idoit2’: The co-patterning of contingency and evaluation in microblogging. M. Taboada & R. Trnavac [Eds.] Nonveridicality and evaluation: Theoretical, computational and corpus approaches. Brill. pp. 188-213