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Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, foursquare – we no longer just communicate; we interact. In the process, how can the wealth of information being generated by social media help us better understand how our cities function and create smarter cities in the process?
Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all report membership in the hundreds of millions. Google+, the social media network launched by the search engine giant early in 2011, saw 25 million people sign up in its first four weeks. Foursquare popularised geolocation in social media, and now photographs, tweets and status updates can be tagged with your location. Our appetite for social media is changing the way we communicate and offers new ways to interact with our cities.
Over a billion people worldwide log on to social networking sites. British internet users on PCs clocked up a total of 169 million hours on Facebook alone in April 2011, according to research by Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator. Mobile users of Facebook, meanwhile, spend more than five and a half hours on the site each month. Clearly, social media is not a fad. Instant communication over social networks – and the presumption of instant feedback – now underpins just about every aspect of our lives. This includes our relationships with local and city governments. The spectacular growth of social media has also increased expectations about transparency and the right to participate in the policy-making process. Used properly, social media represents new value for local authorities, especially when coupled with the right technology, such as a secure private cloud. Leading cities in the UK, US and beyond are already tapping into this hunger for public engagement, with social media playing a part in everything from town planning to combating traffic jams.
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Back in the 1960s, when a single mainframe computer filled an entire room, most of the data was stored on huge reel-to-reel tape drives. Today, most business computers use disk drives for storage, but, for the media and entertainment industry it’s back to the future.
That’s because TV networks and movie studios have so much digital video content to store (686,000 petabytes, growing to 1,780,000 petabytes in 2015, according to Coughlin Associates) and they can’t afford to stash it on expensive disk drives. So they need tape drives that are updated for modern times–enabling them to easily find just the section of video they want, when they want it.
Now, imagine a tense scene on a highway in the Nevada desert in March of 2009. David Pease, an IBM Research scientist, was driving a rented van toward Las Vegas while Michael Richmond, another researcher, typed away on his laptop computer and made frequent phone calls to Lucas Villa Real, an IBM scientist based in Brazil.
They were putting the finishing touches on a technology that’s now called Linear Tape File System (LTFS), which was designed to provide broadcasters and movie studios with the responsiveness and searchability of disk storage at the price of tape storage. They were set up to demonstrate the technology to attendees of the National Association of Broadcaster’s annual convention. The drive from IBM Research – San Jose to Vegas took 10 hours. Richmond and Real were coding and debugging all the way. “It was down to the wire, but it worked well enough that people saw the potential of it and they got very excited,” says Pease.
He and some of his IBM colleagues will be attending the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Primetime Emmy Engineering Awards ceremony today at the Renaissance Hotel in Los Angeles. At the ceremony, IBM and Fox Networks Group will receive an Emmy for media workflow transformation and pioneering the development and application of LTFS.
Here’s the famous Did You Know 4.0 video about the proliferation of digital media and communications.
Guest post by Jonathan Taplin, Professor at the University of Southern California and the Director of the school’s Annenberg Innovation Lab. Next week Professor Taplin will be participating in the IBM Information on Demand and Business Analytics Forum (IOD11).
Two more World Series games played and millions of tweets later, IBM and USC Annenberg Innovation Lab students uncovered new findings in fans’ social sentiment in our ongoing World Series analysis.
Despite lower TV ratings for Game 3, we saw the volume of tweets increase from Game 2 as baseball’s diehard fans continue to turn to the Twitterverse and other social media platforms to pontificate about the game play and players and coaches on the field.
Using the same metrics from our initial World Series analysis, the number of “sentiment” tweets – that is, tweets both positive and negative, in our most recent sampling showed:
– In Game 3: St. Louis Cardinals’ Albert Pujols and the Texas Rangers’ Nelson Cruz were the most tweeted among players and coaches.
– In Game 4, the Cardinals’ Albert Pujols kept his crown and the Rangers’ Derek Holland led his team for total number of tweets.

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Great game play not only can result in a W for the team, but also a W for individual social media accolades. In this most recent analysis, St. Louis Cardinals’ Albert Pujols, amassed unbelievable numbers following his historic baseball performance, receiving the most tweets on his team for both Game 3 and Game 4 and the most positive sentiment at 81% and 87% respectively. The same could be said for the Rangers’ Derek Holland in Game 4, who received the most tweets and an 83% positive sentiment. Rangers’ Michael Young netted most positive sentiment on his team for Game 3 with 83%. For those keeping score at home, the positive sentiment is the result of ‘T’ scores – the ratio of positive to negative sentiment indicated in tweets.
Our second analysis accurately correlates players’ large volumes of tweets to fans’ positive feedback, reiterating how important social media platforms are to capturing consumer sentiment and uncovering actionable insights. More importantly, it affords us an opportunity to view consistencies and inconsistencies with sentiment—what players continue to stay hot amongst fans, who is falling off the bandwagon, via real-time data to make or change decisions, be it promotions or other marketing efforts. It also goes to show those relying solely on mediums such as TV to uncover new fan insights will be at a disadvantage to their peers who are turning to social media to analyze sentiment to get a real-time temperature check on public attitudes as well as customer segments like diehard baseball fans that can result in making more insightful decisions.
Stay tuned for our final analysis at the conclusion of the World Series. Enjoy the rest of the Series!
- Read about social media analysis from Games 1 and 2.
- Read more about “Behind the Diamond: Understanding MLB Fan Sentiment.”
- Learn about how IBM and USC AIL are conducting the social media analysis project.
- Check out images from the World Series Social Sentiment Index





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