Who Tweets the most about Gov20? Dr. Brand Niemann Director and Senior Data Scientist Semantic Community July 5, 2011 1.

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Who Tweets the most about Gov20?

Dr. Brand NiemannDirector and Senior Data Scientist

Semantic CommunityJuly 5, 2011

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Preface

• Who Tweets the most about Gov20?– Ever wonder what happens to all those millions of tweets

each day (the Library of Congress is archiving them) and what you could know if you could retrieve them and somehow visualize them effectively? My editor, Wyatt Kash, and I have wondered about that for some time now - how we could solve that problem and help our new AOL Government readers do that with their own tweets and those hashtags (#) that are set up for events that we attend or would like to have attended. Well today we can show you one solution that provided some interesting insights!

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Gov20 Tweets

http://twitter.com/#!/saved-search/%23gov20

Could only get back to July 3rd on July 5th!

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Searchtastic

http://www.searchtastic.com/index.php

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Searchtastic

http://www.searchtastic.com/index.php?Top100=1

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Searchtastic

http://www.searchtastic.com/about.php

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Searchtastic

http://www.searchtastic.com/index.php?User=&Search=%23gov20&Page=1

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Searchtastic

http://semanticommunity.info/@api/deki/files/12979/=SearchtasticExport%2523gov2007042011.xlsx

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Spotfire

PC Desktop Spotfire

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Describe the chart, how it’s made• Chris Holden, Community Manager for Recorded Future, suggested I try a

tool for retrieving past tweets called Searchtastic. Well I did and got immediate results (about 30 seconds) as a downloadable spreadsheets which I then imported into Spotfire where I cloud do exploratory data analysis! I was able to retrieve 2062 #gov20 Tweets back to March 29, 2009.

• In the Scatterplot to the right one can see Number of Followers versus Number of Following and the two extremes for each (A Googler and Jay Oatway) by mousing over those data points. Using the Filters to the right, one can select a Name and/or Location to see the results for those facets. The user can also mouse over individual data points below to get the details and select one or more rows in the table to see those results plotted and displayed in the Details on Demand. It is of real interest to note that Tweeters Tim O'Reilly (red band), John Moore (light brown band), and Alec Ross (dark brown band) clearly stand out as the most consistently regular tweeters in the Scatter Plot below!

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How it succeeds or falls short

• The chart gives you a database of historic tweets that can be downloaded (click on the down arrow in the Spotfire Web Player) or the Excel file attached to the documentation in the Wiki that you can analyze using your favorite tool. The chart also gives you three adjacent interactive displays (table and two scatter plots) that are linked to other another for your explorative data analysis.

• The chart does not analyze the content of the tweets as to their recommendations or predictions for Gov 20 - that comes next.

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Recorded Future

http://blog.recordedfuture.com/

Government analystsFinancial analystsIntelligence analysts

Next I am on to using Recorded Future for visualization of the #gov20 tweets. See an excellent interview by Reuters Insider of RF CEO Christopher Ahlberg on their blog . RF is backed by the CIA and Google.