Comments on: Flu infects Twitter

By: wayneandwax.com » Pop Goes the World

wayneandwax.com » Pop Goes the World — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:38:42 +0000

[...] people received and tapped out tweets on their phones and laptops. Ethan Zuckerman, who wrote a script to track Twitter activity (post-Moldova and the like), announced on Thursday night that 15% of all [...]

By: in news survival. at Where They Are

in news survival. at Where They Are — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:48:32 +0000

[...] saw the first reports of Michael Jackson’s death on Twitter around 6pm. I ran a little script I threw together some weeks ago called “twitcent” to see just how many tweets would share the news. Twitcent takes advantage of [...]

By: …My heart’s in Accra » Flock, part two - Twitter and the news cycle, perfect together

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 02:47:42 +0000

By: …My heart’s in Accra » More on Twitter. (Moron twitter?)

…My heart’s in Accra » More on Twitter. (Moron twitter?) — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:46:31 +0000

[...] past weekend, I wrote a quick tool that estimates the incidence of certain words within the twitter stream using just a single search, not polling for weeks of data as some of my other tools do. This makes [...]

By: johne

johne — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 21:21:48 +0000

“Gripe” is flu in a lot of Latin America, and and “gripe porcina” is swine flu.

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:10:23 +0000

I did a bit of analysis on the twitterfall yesterday. I looked for occurrences of #swineflu, then built a directed graph from all the “@” connections. I got about 11,000 tweets in that period.

http://onearmedman.com/research/swineflu24

Some interesting stuff came up. It’s definitely more of an look inside the #swineflu channel, instead of looking Twitter-wide for the patterns, but I was able to see who the major authorities and hubs were as far as what gets replied to and retweeted, plus made some nice (big) GraphViz files.

Anyway, the major authority was “CDC Emergency”–everyone retweeted tweets coming from that account. Evgeny Morozov did a great piece on the Swine Flu, but I think he missed how often info like this gets retweeted, even if the original poster only does so occasionally. Both bad and good info gets echoed around, but CDC Emergency was by far the most highly-ranked authority, if that says anything.

On the flip side, the major hub was tweeter AndrewPWilson, who works for HHS in their social media group and did a bang-up job retweeting sane and informative URLs and replying to the public. I think he really helped keep a lid on the crazy.

I haven’t posted the Python code I used for this yet, but I’ll do so soon, if it’s of interest to you or others.

By: Katrin

Katrin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:38:55 +0000

Watching the #influenza stream and having just come back from Mexico City, I agree with @oso about Mexicans being rather witty, acerbic, and a lot less concerned about the swine flu. It was explained to me this way: We have had so many crises in this country, what’s another one? We just deal – and get on with it.

I do appreciate all of the work (and Perl coding) you are putting into this and am looking forward to the next iteration of Media Cloud to include Twitter, etc.

By: David Sasaki

David Sasaki — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:46:36 +0000

The hashtag #gripacochina was a joke of poor taste playing off the doble sentido of cochina. From my observations, what #swineflu reveals is that 1.) worry is more viral than viruses 2.) Americans worry more than Mexicans. For those who are curious as to what your average Mexican Twitter user is tweeting about these days, some of the most popular are: andresb, lion05, danysaadia, agkamai, and zolliker, and RodrigoMx. RodrigoMx is a bit of an outlier as he considers himself a source of breaking news, but in general what you'll see is that Mexican twitterers aren't terribly concerned with swine flu. On the other hand, if you look at the twitter accounts of expats in Mexico, 90% of their tweets are about swine flu.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:31:49 +0000

Their technique is orders of magnitude more rigorous than mine, Jonathan. From what I understand, they’re looking at people searching for symptoms – mine just looks for chatter about the flu. Theirs has a good chance of early detection of epidemics in places where the flu isn’t a major news story – mine is simply showing how quickly discussion and worry about swine flu is currently spreading.

By: Jonathan O'Donnell

Jonathan O'Donnell — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 06:26:07 +0000

Early detection of pandemics is really, really important in treating them. People talking about the flu might reflect media attention to a new flu but it might also reflect people having the flu.

In February 2009, Google published a letter in Nature on Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data.

From the abstract:
“One way to improve early detection is to monitor health-seeking behaviour in the form of queries to online search engines, which are submitted by millions of users around the world each day. Here we present a method of analysing large numbers of Google search queries to track influenza-like illness in a population. Because the relative frequency of certain queries is highly correlated with the percentage of physician visits in which a patient presents with influenza-like symptoms, we can accurately estimate the current level of weekly influenza activity in each region of the United States, with a reporting lag of about one day.”

I would love for your technique and their technique to get together and rhumba. Importance of data redundancy and all that.

I’m guessing that you are already familiar with this article, but I thought that I would post it here anyway, just in case.