I’m writing this as the rain falls down in Austin, Texas. I’m learning that with practice, you can learn the ebb and flow of a conversation and become a meteorologist for the “social weather” that’s ongoing in a community. For an example of social weather, do what Clay Shirky describes in his description of the course with the same name at New York University. Simply make some observations next time you walk into a restaurant. Is it noisy or quiet? Slow or busy? Are there couples or groups dining? That collective atmosphere is the social weather, which I first read about on Jason Kottke’s blog.
In a restaurant you have visual and auditory cues to give your inner meteorologist a chance to assess the social weather. In an online community, you need to understand the cues that occur in writing, in emoticons, and in frequency and intensity of updates to content. In the presentation “Blogs and the social weather” at the Internet Research 3.0 conference in October 2002, Alex Halavais describes a deep dive into analysis of blogger’s discourse.
“By measuring changes in word frequency within a large set of popular blogs over a period of four weeks, and comparing these changes to those in the ‘traditional’ media represented on the web, we are able to come to a better understanding of the nature of the content found on these sites. This view is further refined by clustering those blogs that carry similar content. While those who blog may not be very representative of the public at large, charting discourse in this way presents an interesting new window on public opinion.”
While this concept may sound new and exciting, it is quite 20th century. I was surprised to learn that analyzing newspaper content to determine public opinion was researcher Alvan Tenney’s original concept in 1912. 1912!