By Estaban Moro

Millions of tweets, retweets and mentions are exchanged in Twitter everyday about very different subjects, events, opinions, etc. While aggregating this data over a time window might help to understand some properties of those processes in online social networks, the speed of information diffusion around particular time-bound events requires a temporal analysis of them. To show that (and with the help of the Text & Opinion Mining Group at IIC) we collected all tweets (750k) of the vibrant conversation around the disputed subject of the general strike of March 29th in Spain. The data spans 10 days from 03/27 to 04/04 and using the RTs related to the general strike between twitter accounts we build up the following temporal network of information diffusion in Twitter.

Day/night human rhythms are clearly seen, and there is an increase of activity in the evening/night before March 29th, which ended in the burst of RTs during that day. Moreover, using community-finding algorithms over the static (weighted) network of RTs we could assign each twitter account to one of the communities found. Analyzing the text of tweets within those communities we found the nature of the biggest groups: one is in favor of the economic motivations behind the strike, the other is not. Those communities fight close to dominate information propagation in Twitter even some days after the strike.This video highlights the importance of temporal networks in the analysis of information diffusion in online social networks.

Technical details: the video was done using the amazing igraph package in R and encoded using ffmpeg. Thanks to everyone that contributes to those open-source projects for their work.

Instagram produces far more engagement than other social media sites for brand advertising.

http://blogs.forrester.com/nate_elliott/14-04-29-instagram_is_the_king_of_social_engagement

Ecologist Deborah Gordon studies ants wherever she can find them – in the desert, in the tropics, in her kitchen … In this fascinating talk, she explains her obsession with insects most of us would happily swat away without a second thought. She argues that ant life provides a useful model for learning about many other topics, including disease, technology and the human brain.

“OKComrade , a new dating platform which launched on May 4, bills itself as a leftist alternative to “bourgeois” dating sites like OKCupid — a way for socialists, communists and anarchists to connect with like-minded revolutionaries.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/15/okcomrade_n_5326274.html

Scarborough consumer data suggests that the way you use the Internet reflects your political preference and likelihood of voting. Their chart shows some interesting patterns: people tracking sports and financial information are more likely to vote Republican; people listening to music or looking for a job are more likely to vote Democratic. However, as we all do in academia, if we consider the traditional factors, i.e.age and income, these may be all back to the basics. Read more on Washington Post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/05/13/what-your-internet-use-says-about-your-politics/

On Thursday, the FCC approved the proposal with a 3-2 vote, opening a period of 120 days of public comments in which anyone, from stakeholders like broadband providers and net neutrality advocates to the average netizen, can weigh in and propose changes to the document. After this period, the FCC will write a final set of rules and vote on them. http://mashable.com/2014/05/15/fcc-net-neutrality-proposal-document/

http://mashable.com/2014/05/14/yahoo-buys-blink/?utm_cid=mash-com-li-main-link

http://www.psfk.com/2014/05/applebees-private-chat-app.html#!M99ND A new app was released that allows anyone inside an Applebee’s restaurant to anonymously chat with one another. “The app itself may seem a little ridiculous, but it points to the very real possibility of restaurants – or any establishment, for that matter – creating their own location-based social networks, which they can take advantage of by using it to send promotional messages or create in-store communities, and they can even throw in perks and incentives for members to join in.”

The robust defenses that yeast cells have evolved to protect themselves from environmental threats hold lessons that can be used to design computer networks and analyze how secure they are, say computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University. Read More at: http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news/2014/05/molecular-neural-bacterial-networks-provide-security-insights

General Stanley McChrystal makes a case for sharing knowledge beyond the traditional need-to-know model and talks about the benefits of information dissemination. In his explanation of the significant culture shift from “who needs to know” to “who doesn’t know, and we need to tell, and tell them as quickly as we can” you can see the need for mapping knowledge networks and communication networks and understanding the connections between them. http://www.ted.com/talks/stanley_mcchrystal_the_military_case_for_sharing_knowledge