Modern Metrix

Google Study of Web Browsing Habits

Wow, it looks like Google has partnered with Knowlede Networks to conduct a large-scale study of web browsing habits:

"A new Google project named Screenwise looks set to offer Amazon vouchers in return for information about your browsing habits.

While it doesn’t appear to have launched officially yet, a landing page highlighted bySearch Engine Land notes that “Google is building a new panel to learn more about how everyday people use the Internet.”

Screenwise will work via a Chrome browser extension which Google will use to track the sites you visit and how often you visit them. “What we learn from you, and others like you, will help us improve Google products and services and make a better online experience for everyone,” the landing page says. You can enter your email address on the page if you’d like to learn more."

I tried to sign up but got an error message. Perhaps, Google Spreadsheets can't handle too many requests?

Profiles of E-bay Users According to Hunch

Interesting infographic report from the "personalization graph" company Hunch that developed psychographic and behavioral profiles of e-bay users based on data from 70,000 respondents. Among the most interesting findings: e-bay users are more likely to be happy with their job , prefer impressionalism and surrealism when it comes to art, and read "The New Yorker". Non-users, on the other hand, are more likely to be unhappy with their jobs, prefer realism and romanticism, and are more likely to read "People" magazine. 

4.74 Degrees of Separation

Interesting article in NYTimes about most recent replication of Milgram's famous "small world experiment". The original research introduced concept "six degrees of separation" - that any two people in the world are separated by only six intermediate connections. According to Facebook scientists, who analyzed data on 721 million active Facebook users with total of 69 billion friendships, that number now is down to 4.74. Of course, I would question definition of "friendship" used in the study (it was defined simply as a being "friends" on Facebook), nevertheless, the methodology and analysis are interesting. 

More detailed report is available on Facebook Data page here.  

Tweets and biological rhythms

NYT discusses a paper by Scott Golder and Michael Macy from Cornell University on correlation between the emotional tone of people's messages on Twitter and known biological rhytms (aka cyrcadian rhytms). Using text mining software and impressive sample (several millions of tweets), researchers classified random tweets based on their content (usage of words "awesome", "great' and emoticons) as either "positive" or "negative", and then looked at the patterns throughout the day. They found that for majority of people, positive tweets tend to appear in the morning (between 6 am and 9 am), slowly decline towards afternoon, and then rise again after dinner. In the beginning of the workweek the overall mood tends to be lower, with the curve peaking on weekends. The patterns seem to be the same across different cultures.  

 

Image source and more info are here

Tell me what e-mail service do you use, and I will tell you your credit score?

Interesting post in TechCrunch on differences in average credit score across the users of different public e-mail services. Obviously, these differences are of socio-demographic and geo-demographic nature.

 

 

Free Book on Social Media Measurement and Analysis

Great FREE book on Social Media Measurement and Analysis from Radian6  http://bit.ly/cm8pS1

Differences in content preferences across the social networks

The online advertising network Chitika compared the genres of sites that receive traffic from the major social networks (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Digg) and found differences in the content preferences across the networsk. In particular, according to the analysis of over 280,000 links, Twitter users are more like to consume news (47% of traffic), Facebook users are interested in news (28% of traffic) and community (17%), MySpacers prefer video games (28% of traffic) and entertainment (23%), and traffic from Digg is almost equally distributed between news, entertainment, technology and video games categories (~18% each).

Via Mashable

 

Geographical differences in online behavior?

Do folks on the West coast behave differently online than folks in the North-East or South? See yourself (charts show indices, based on total online population):  

Source: Anonymous.

What news articles are more likely to be shared?

This interesting study by researchers from University of Pennsylvania looked at how the topic, content, lenght, style and other characteristics of the news articles affect the likelihood of people sharing them.

"To make sense of these trends in “virality,” the Penn researchers tracked more than 7,500 articles published from August 2008 to February 2009. They assessed each article’s popularity after controlling for factors like the time of day it was published online, the section in which it appeared and how much promotion it received on the Web home page.

A random sample of 3,000 of these articles was rated by independent readers for qualities like providing practical value or being surprising. The researchers also used computer algorithms to track the ratio of emotional words in an article and to assess the relative positivity or negativity..

..More emotional stories were more likely to be e-mailed, the researchers found, and positive articles were shared more than negative ones. Longer articles generally did better than shorter articles, although Dr. Berger said that might just be because the longer articles were about more engaging topics. (The best way to test that, he said, would be for The Times to run shorter and longer versions of the same article that would be seen by different readers.)

..Surprising articles, like one about free-range chickens on the streets of New York, were also more likely to be e-mailed — which was a hardly a surprising discovery, of course. But the researchers also kept finding popular articles with a quality that went beyond surprise."

Grab some free data on 215 mln. Facebook users, for free!

Pete Warden is making data on over 200 mln Facebook users available to academic research community this week. The fields in the dataset are limited to publicly available info such names, location, fan pages, and friends lists. Pete also shares some preliminary insights:

"In almost every state in the Southern U.S., God is number one most popular Fan page among Facebook users. Among people in the L.A., San Francisco and Nevada regions? "God hardly makes an appearance on the fan pages, but sports aren't that popular either," Warden writes. "Michael Jackson is a particular favorite, and San Francisco puts Barack Obama in the top spot." In the Oregon and Idaho region? Starbucks is number one.

In the Mormon-influenced areas of Utah and Eastern Idaho, the most popular Fan pages are The Book of Mormon, Glen Beck and the vampire book Twilight, which was authored by a Mormon.

The bulk of Warden's posted analysis yesterday was about location networks. People in the western U.S. tend to have Facebook friends all over the country; people in the southern U.S. tend to mostly be friends with people who have remained in the same area."