BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

We are the canaries in the buzz mine

10 comments on We are the canaries in the buzz mine

We are the canaries in the buzz mine
: Virginia Postrel had a fascinating column yesterday on buzz and efforts to capture it online. The topic was TV and Usenet groups, but there are implications for weblogs and politics, media, culture, business, and more.

To see how word of mouth might affect new TV shows, Professor Godes and Dina Mayzlin, a marketing professor at the Yale School of Management, tapped this recorded form of conversation [in Internet forums]. Using online archives, they tracked postings in Usenet discussion groups at the beginning of the 1999-2000 TV season. (The paper, now under review at the journal Marketing Science, is available at www.som.yale.edu/faculty/dm324/papers.asp.)…

Looking at the relation between this online word of mouth and the programs’ ratings, the scholars got two significant results.

First, they discovered that online conversations did help predict which shows would succeed

10 responses to “We are the canaries in the buzz mine”

  1. Seyed Razavi Avatar
    Seyed Razavi

    It’s my observation that the darwinism of the link network around blogs is the real beauty of blog influence. To say blogging is influential is just a short-hand to saying, “the blog network filters out and gives prominence to the influential”.
    It’s the efficiency of the transmission of ideas and filtering them that matters.
    Other forms of media have the same characteristics and potentials for influence (except more so at present given their wider distribution) but they all depend upon two things to filter quality and attribute influence:
    * Editorial control
    * Market forces (where they apply)
    Weblogs offer the same characteristics but differently. Editorial control is done en masse and there’s nothing like the hyperlink market for applying force…
    Blogs are a neural net of ideas.
    The really interesting efficiencies will only really come as the net becomes increasingly “self-aware” and by this I simply mean where connection analysis leads to information that isn’t evident on the individual nodes themselves. We are already tenatively getting there with services such as BlogDex but the sheer mass of information makes them just temporal snapshot… much like a goldfish’s cognitive awareness.
    Just imagine the potential academic studies that come in 2-3 years time by data mining the network history (say Blogdex’ or Technorati’s data archive) and what we can potentially learn from that. Or a dedicated effort to analyse the network conversations in real-time.
    Self-awareness and the uncertainty principal can have a dramatic impact on the shape of influence. We already see adjusted behaviour due to popularity metrics and conversations gaining gravity as they spread (ie. memes).
    The potential for increased efficiency in transmission and improved proficiency in diagnosis is where the Internet really becomes revolutionary… although, it’ll feel more like rapid evolution I suspect.

  2. Harry Avatar
    Harry

    As someone who has done a fair bit of sniping I have to say I agree with most of this Jeff.
    Our scene in the UK is much smaller but already some bloggers have been picked up by national media and there is no doubt that many journalists browse blogs for ideas.
    Traffic to my blog has doubled in the past six months and that is with very little increase in US readers (most US bloggers with a few honourable exceptions ignore UK blogs) – that means the British audience for blogs is growing.
    Interesting times.

  3. Stephen Dulaney Avatar
    Stephen Dulaney

    It is about norm formation in social influence networks. There is some nice work by Noah Friedkin that can be applied to this stuff. One point is that the attitudes or shared norms tend to converge in order to reduce discourse and conflict. Its a great read but the implications are that you should be able to model the initial position of the norms and then knowing the members determine what the likely convergence will be. That is huge when trying to win presidential elections.
    Thanks to the pointers on Dina’s papers. That method of Netnogrophy is getting wider use. Aplying that to the RSS Atom conversation would be interesting.

  4. Lisa Williams Avatar
    Lisa Williams

    I’m hoping that “citizen journalists” will influence those in the traditional newsmedia, elected officials, and others, to pay attention to locales that are poorly covered. It’s easier for me to get news about Indonesia than it is for me to find out who’s running for city council in my town, because my local newspaper was taken over by a conglomerate who now publishes 8 pages a week of news for a town of 32,000 people. I wrote an essay about how in some cases bloggers could beat “professional” newsmedia in some circumstances not just on quality but also on quantity. You can see it here.

  5. Joel Avatar
    Joel

    When I think back to life before blogs, I remember now that the first thing after the front-page headlines that I used to read in my daily paper would be the letters to the editor, even before reading most of the columnists. (I almost never read any newspaper’s own editorials and, of course, now I hardly read the paper at all.) I guess I have always been thirsty for what blogs now offer in such abundance and quality.

  6. Jay Rosen, PressThink Avatar
    Jay Rosen, PressThink

    I don’t know if this applies to what Seyed, Harry and others are saying, but: Yesterday Salon published a piece of mine a little sooner than planned. I speculate that’s because they saw it spreading by link. I don’t think it was the number of lost readers that might concern Salon (or me if I ran the site), but something akin to the “buzz factor,” which is confirmed by certain numbers but goes beyond that. Jeff: I think your small sample, big influence argument is sound, and intriguing as we contemplate prospects. Cheers.

  7. Lisa Williams Avatar
    Lisa Williams

    Joel — totally agree. I love the letters section of newspapers and magazines, and sometimes, like reading The Nation, they are the liveliest part of the experience for me.

  8. henrycopeland Avatar
    henrycopeland

    Some random brainstorming, not to be mistaken for rational argument:
    At Bloggercon Jeff reitterated that “the gatekeeper is dead.” Traditional reporters/editors/publishers are being swamped by self-organizing networks of minds.
    The metaphor for news creation/distribution is no longer the factory or production line, but the cafe or bazaar.
    As Seyed says, we constantly compete for attention and respect and “link market competition” is a wonderful new sorting mechanism for information. Link competition is all the more powerful because it parallels/amplifies innate offline social behavior.
    In 1999, Cluetrain reinvigorated the pre-industrial idea that “markets are conversations.” Now we’re rediscovering and re-engineering the idea that “conversations are markets.”

  9. Seyed Razavi Avatar
    Seyed Razavi

    > In 1999, Cluetrain reinvigorated the pre-industrial idea that “markets are conversations.” Now we’re rediscovering and re-engineering the idea that “conversations are markets.”
    Beautifully put Henry.
    On a related tangent, I’m doing some development to test some of these ideas out in a very different way than BlogShares. Stay tuned.

  10. hugh macleod Avatar
    hugh macleod

    Good point, Henry.
    It’s funny how blogs differ from old dotcom websites. In 1998, it was “Come to my website because there’s all this cool stuff on it.” Now it’s “Come to my website because I like talking to you.” This “engagement” model will become more common in marketing/advertising etc. TV’s true power wasn’t realised till Madison Avenue started using it. I believe the same is true with blogs… we’re already seeing how blogs can work for presidential candidates and small cottage industries. It’s when Nike and Coca-Cola start using them that it will get really interesting. It’ll take a while, though… most of the people now running agenices made their name making TV commericials… there will be a certain reluctance on their part to evolve.