Trending the Gaza Conversation

How does our conversation about things like Gaza compare to the propaganda that's being spit out constantly by the news media. This is the 14th day straight that "gaza" and "israel" have been in the top 10 most mentioned subjects in the media on NewsBubbles.org which has quite a wide coverage of major news sources from all over the world.

Note for first time bubblers: a "bubble" is a person place or thing, like a subject, but can also be a subject phrase. And sometimes is not a subject at all, but is still a relevant word within the context that you're looking at.

I put together a simple trending tool using my NewsBubbles engine that allows me to see the trend in the #gaza conversation on twitter by grabbing the gaza search information from their server on a regular basis. Found some supremely interesting results.

1. The first 3 bubbles were EXACTLY the same: israel, hamas, israeli - in that order
2. In the twitter trend, the bubble "terror" shows up as 4th most related to the word gaza whereas "terror" does not show up within the top 30 related bubbles in the news media at all.
3. The most talkative "tweeple" about the subject right now (Jan 11, 09 7:00pm GMT) are @rafik, @oronhaus, @wfisrael, and @UnionSt who are not very popular, but quite opinionated and in the middle of a convo about it on different sides of the fence.
4. Spanish people and their media are more supporting the civilians of Gaza, whereas people from the United States are more supporting Israel and their Military + people + decisions. Neither supports Hamas, and neither likes terror. I see this as a result of the difference between what each of the newspapers covers. El Pais (the national newspaper of Spain [btw: created by x director of Washington Post]) is contrary to most popular U.S papers on the subject.
5. The bubble "peace" is higher up on the conversation trend, maybe suggesting the people are more for an end to the conflict, wheras on the Media trend it doesn't show up in the top 30. Instead, the media focuses more on the conflict, and the offensive, rockets and bombs.
6. The media does not refer to israel as jews as a popular trend whereas people discussing the topic do.
   

A couple things to mention. The results may vary because I'm going on the last 100 articles printed about gaza, whereas the conversation on twitter is only for the last hour at the time I ran the trending tool. Here are the raw results from both of the tools, color coded for easy comparison. English speakers are predominant on both sources of information (media and twitter.)

People's Conversation Trend:
israel, hamas, israeli, military, terror, palestinian, idf, sight, militaryspokesman, spokesman, civilian, jews, peace, ignorance, useful, side, children, gaza war, people

The Media Publication Trend:
israel, hamas, israeli, offensive, palestinian, gaza strip, city, gaza city, militant, conflict, tunnel, military, bomb, leaflet, international, medic, call, wider offensive, attack, rocket sites, frantic diplomacy, troops

Both of the two results were taken from the same day this article was printed.

Conclusion

Another interesting thing is that looking at the twitter trend on their search engine, gaza is on the list as most popular at the time, as well as on NewsBubbles trend list for all of the articles printed yesterday, (NewsBubbles gives yesterday's trend on the home page,) and often times really close to the most popular. I am looking more into this, and expanding the conversational tool to cover tweets over more time so that a more solid trend will show up within that search.

It is interesting that the top three show up in the same order. I created newsbubbles to trend the media in such a way as to create a matrix of bubbles that is supposed to simulate the mind of the media. When compared in a simple way to the trend of conversation, it covers almost exactly the same topics in the same importance.

My personal opinion based off of my observations is that the News Media guides most of the conversation of the people. This is something I've seen over my whole life, but now that I'm using mathematics to plot this out, I'm finding it's true for the most part.

What are some other popular subjects you want me to perform trend comparison on?

You can leave a comment without signing up... I welcome them. Also, I'm @softmaestro on twitter.

More about Bubbling and Context

Here's an interesting bubble: "seahawks"

Now I don't know anything about American Football and who's hot right now, cause I don't follow sports in general, but using the BubbleSphere, I can find out a lot of information really quickly about who the Seahawks are as a team, who are their top newsworthy players, and more information that I can grab from looking at just one page with 30 images on it.

Some quick observations from the first page:

• First thing I notice is their logo... the bluish and greenish eagle head
• The first bubble from the center says "seattle" and has their logo again... this is information that will always be associated with seahawks because most places mention the city along with the name of the team
• The second bubble says "Matt Hasselbeck" who I'm assuming is their quarter-back since the next bubble after that is "quarterback".
• Looking at the feeds using "seahawks" most, I see that NewsBubbles is actually pulling from four different sections of the seattle times, who mention the seahawks the most... the front page, the seahawks section, the sports section, and the local section, which, in the last 45 days from Nov 26th, 2008, happened to mention them in 34 articles.

There is obviously way more to see on the first page, but for the sake of the fact that you have to read this article, I'll keep it to that... some other things there were: Jim Zorn, Deion Branch, Seneca Wallace, Washington, Cardinals, Sunday, Victory, and some other things like tuesday, night, play, game, etc... if I drilled-down on these, I would find out more contextual information about them, but I just want to know who this "Mike Holmgren" guy is, cause I saw him pretty close to the top of the list.

• I double-click "mike holmgren"... When you double-click something in the bubble spiral, you add it to what's in the middle, or the focus, thus drilling down on it.
• Looking at the "seahawks mike holmgren" bubble, the first bubble next to that is "coach", so I'm assuming that he's their coach. In this spiral, I also notice that it's his final season, one bubble says.

I could take these bubbles back into time as well, but this is just one example of how I can get a lot of information and very current information about what's going on with whatever I'm bubbling, within seconds. Things I would have to read and scan the entire wiki page of the seahawks, or google to figure out, much less just buy a recent book about them... but I'm not in to sports all that much. However, if I wanted to have a conversation where I look like I know what I'm talking about, I could sit on NewsBubbles for 10 minutes or so and get all of the latest players, happenings, events, trades, game results, etc., on the seahawks.

The pictures really help and a lot of the times are in the context of what I'm looking at, and the words associated with them.

NewsBubbles and the power of Context-Time Exploration

The Bubble Time Machine!

It's not absolutely complete yet... but I've been playing with it in pre-release mode and want you guys to see the power of it before It's released.

I've been studying the relationship between the words "crisis" and "stimulus" using NewsBubbles.org, my news exploration tool. The system basically works through extracting all of the "subject clauses" or bubbles from the articles of majorly syndicated news networks, and then builds a relationship matrix, showing you what other words are most mentioned in the news along with the phrase you put in.

The Buble Time Machine is powerful, because since you're browsing through the context of things, you can now see what the context was yesterday, or a year ago for your bubbles... for instance... look at these two different dates for obama. One when he was just a candidate, one when it was just him and mccain, one when he was elected, and one now that he's president-elect.

January of this Year - Notice the second thing on his list is Clinton : there were 100 articles syndicated about him every 8 days or so.

The end of September - Up against McCain, they had the debates... some of the issues they talk about are listed there too : 100 articles in 6 days related to obama

Election Day - Notice election is about the 5th most related word to obama behind mccain, ofcourse

Day after Election - VICTORY! lol... victory for obama, second bubble on the list... behind his full name... they seem to mention his full name almost every time in their articles. : 100 articles in one day

November 25th - 20 days after his victory, and he's now offering the stimulus package for the economic crisis... etc. etc.. : Notice he's gotten much more coverage now.. over 100 articles in 1 day about obama

This is just an example of what you can compare... I've been looking at the word "crisis" and found some interesting things, looking back. You'll see the options for the date slider coming soon in the user interface for NewsBubbles

When you look at the bubbles through time and how they change, they tend to tell the story without you having to actually read much besides the words that actually matter. Keep in mind that the sources I'm using are top news media organizations... wether you trust them or not, this is not telling their story, this is just telling you what they say mostly, in relation to whatever you want.

Stay tuned for more NewsBubbles Updates