Swarm Creativity Blog

People have long predicted the demise of traditional news media and the rise of the citizen journalists. Various initiatives have tried to create new media outlets on the Web, Blog, and Twitter powered by creative swarms of hobby journalists - but none of them has been a breakthrough success so far. Well, it turns out that there is such a citizen Web site, venerable old Wikipedia! In a series of earlier projects we have analyzed collaboration among Wikipedia authors when creating new Wikipedia articles, for example studying how they collaborate as COINs in different cultures (http://www.ickn.org/documents/COINS2010_Nemoto_Gloor.pdf). In our current project we are creating a map based on Who-works-with-whom-on-Wikipedia (the "W5-map"). We build a semantic network of concepts by constructing a link between two Wikipedia articles if the same author has worked on both articles. This W5-map shows us to what kind of articles the swarm flocks to. By repeating this pr...

Who are happier, people in Switzerland, in Germany, or in the US? To answer this question, I looked at the use of smiley’s in Twitter tweets – smileys are those emoticons used to express one’s emotions like :) smile :D big grin :( sad, frown :P sticking the tongue out, “raspberry” My hypothesis is that the larger the fraction of happy smileys :) and :D in all tweets containing emoticons is, the happier people in this region are. Using Condor’s Twitter collector, I collected 24 hours worth of tweets containing the smileys listed above in 6 cities in three countries: New York and Los Angeles (USA), Berlin and Hamburg (Germany) and Zurich and Berne (Switzerland). I collected all tweets inside a radius of 25 kilometers around the geocoordinates of these 6 cities returned by Google. The table below lists the results, showing the number of people using each emoticon in each city, as well as the betweenness centrality of the emoticon in the social network of people using it. As we can se...