[Air-L] twitter useless to study?

[S. Courtney Walton]

I'm wrapping up a quantitative content analysis of Twitter, looking at
levels of self-disclosure among professional and parent bloggers.

Spam hasn't been an issue with the 300 public users in the study.

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Barry Wellman <wellman at chass.utoronto.ca>wrote:

> As an object of study, its hard to do quant analysis of Twitter now because
> so much of it is spam (unless you're studying spam, that is).
>
> And even qualitative analyses will have to be careful.
>
> Our 2 Twitterology papers got into the sweet spot when Twitter was an
> appreciable size but before spam dominated (about 80% of my new would-be
> Followers)
>
> OTOH, I find Twitter useful for research leads -- such as the Atlantic
> article a tweep broadcast today about how the Internet almost fractured --
> or Zeynep et al's (@techsoc) discussion of social media and MENA
> revolutions.
>  Barry Wellman
>  _______________________________________________________________________
>
>  S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC               NetLab Director
>  Department of Sociology                  725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388
>  University of Toronto   Toronto Canada M5S 2J4   twitter:barrywellman
>  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman             fax:+1-416-978-3963
>  Updating history:      http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php
>  _______________________________________________________________________
>
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-- 
Best Regards,

S. Courtney Walton
scw at umail.ucsb.edu

MA/PhD Student
Department of Communication
4309 Social Sciences & Media Studies Bldg
University of California, Santa Barbara
93106