Betabeat » infographics

Infographic: What Jay-Z and Beyonce’s New Baby Did to Twitter

Foster Kamer — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:04:28 -0400

Imagine being able to tell the other kids that your dad made Reasonable Doubt. Now, one will.

Jay-Z and Beyonce had a baaaaaaaabyyyyyyyyyyy and it's the most exciting news in the history of everrrrrrrrr. You might already know this because you're a sentient human being with access to news outlets, who have covered this earth-shattering event with the investigative prowess probably best reserved for other causes in an ideal world, but that's another conversation. Also, we, too, are guilty of such coverage (because we love Jay-Z. And Beyonce. And their Bey-Z).

You might also know this because you've spent time on Twitter.

Earlier today, Mashable noted the new Power Daughter's effect on Twitter, via the social analytics firm Simply Measured, which noted that tweets per minute about Blue—the Bey-Z in question—"peaked at 2,379 tweets at 11:15 p.m. PT on Saturday, which is a 'healthy number for a non-televised, rumor driven event.'"

Furthermore, they have a wonderful chart to detail this:

Celebrity Baby Announcements: The indisputable, truest value of social media.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The Difference Between Things Clicked ‘Read Later’ and Things That Actually Are Read Later: LifeSlackers

Foster Kamer — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 17:02:14 -0400

Read this NOW.

Yesterday, content-saving service Read It Later—which, like Instapaper, allows you to save the web pages you want to read eventually but don't have time for quite right now—released a list of data about the most "Read It Later"-clicked authors on the entire whole big bad Internet, which goes hand-in-hand with their celebration of the surpassing of four million users.

But that wasn't the only list they released.

Here's the first one, of those authors who got 'Read Me Later'd' the most:

Note:

Lots of gadget readers!
Lots of tech readers!
And a whole bunch of efficiency strategy readers!

But why is that chart so much different from this one, which presents the writers whose writing was actually read later?

Note:

Distinct Voices Win: Deadspin's crew populates this list more than any other. So do big names, like Bill Simmons, and scandal-driven short-reads that might be a little NSFW (see: Gawker's Maureen O'Connor). A lot of these writers have a cult of personality; the dedication to them shows.
Essayists Dominate: Some things are just better read when you have nothing else to do if only for length.
Breaking news writers lose readers: TechCrunch and BoingBoing lose prominence on lists like these if only because the things TechCrunch writes about often lose relevance in the news cycle after only a day, let alone a few hours. BoingBoing, which is usually an early-adopter of news-like memes—or memes that become news, for that matter—loses prominence because the content they start goes everywhere.

But really, there's one very obvious reason why the top of these lists are so different:

Look at the first one again.

Ever been to LifeHacker? There's a reason people are reading it. It's a site about making one's life more efficient.

Either LifeHacker readers are doing a great, great job about making their lives more efficient, or
Lifehacker readers are doing a terrible job making their lives more efficient. And need to read Lifehacker more.

That is all.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Censorship is a Big Hit on Tumblr: SOPA Day Explodes On Tumblogs

Foster Kamer — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 19:13:24 -0400

Today, if you haven't heard, is American Censorship Day: wherein several websites, large tech companies, and boldfaced names in the technology community lent their help to get the word out about the Stop Online Piracy Act going through Congress, which would manifest itself in very frightening, Orwellian controls of the Internet, which would land squarely in the hands of our government, an entity far from capable of doing everything remotely correct, let alone one even marginally free from the threat of systemic power abuse and corruption.

So! Today, Tumblr was the social network who threw their support behind this thing the most. When you first logged on to the site today, everything on your feed appeared with censorship bars over it, like so:

The redirect sent you to a page informing you about SOPA and what you can do (like dial up a Congressional representative) about making sure this thing goes absolutely nowhere.

This afternoon, Adam Laiacano—a Data Engineer at Tumblr—posted a graph to his blog showing the frequency of posts today with the words 'SOPA' or 'censorship' in them. Take a look:

Laiacano notes:

The above plot displays the increase in posts on Tumblr mentioning ‘SOPA’ or ‘censorship’ from the beginning of today up to just a few minutes ago. We launched the announcement just after 11:00 EST and were quickly producing 3.6 calls per second to representatives around the country.

Not bad. So, Drake: What have you done for poltical activism, privacy, and digital rights today, huh? Also, Twitter, Facebook, and Google?*

[*Oh, wait, at least two of those businesses are predicated on the interruption and/or invasion of privacy so they probably won't care about something like this? No, they won't.]