Just a quick post about another conference's Twitter backchannel I analyzed recently. Take a look at my posts on #swineflu and #09ntc to get a full picture of what I'm up to here. Basically, I'm looking at the network formed by replies and retweets in Twitter inside of a particular hashtag. Here, I'll go over the results of Museums and the Web 2009, a.k.a. #mw2009.

I just did a run on the first two days of the 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference using the tools I've been working on (see my post on #swineflu earlier this week.) Using the hashtag #09ntc, I parsed 3834 tweets, and I looked up the hubs and authorities, plus generated the graph of the largest strongly connected component within the larger directed graph created from all the "@" replies and retweets.

I've been doing more research on Twitter recently, mostly looking at back channels from conferences (more on that to come). I wanted to post up a quick analysis, though, on a recent story that blew up big--the Swine Flu outbreak (found in twitter, in part, via the #swineflu hashtag.)

I just read two very interesting articles from two commentators I respect immensely: Clay Shirky's The Failure of #amazonfail and Mary Hodder's Why Amazon Didn’t Just Have a Glitch. I won't do their arguments justice here, but I'll try to summarize as best I can.

I had an interesting experience today watching the various media assembled, largely through twitter, of the protest in 65 5th Ave. While I don't have much to say one way or the other on the event itself, it was fascinating to see the raw news feed come together and to get a sense of the spread of and reaction to the news of a noteworthy event.