Swarm Creativity Blog

With the crisis in the Eurozone approaching its climax, I was curious to read the collective mind. On the Web, in the blogosphere, and on Twitter there is a lot of buzz about Eurozone breakup or survival. I decided to ask both the swarm (through blogs) and experts (through News Web sites) as well as the crowd (through Twitter), using our Condor coolhunting tool. It turns out, swarm and experts think the Euro will survive intact - albeit by quite a slim margin: The picture above shows the Blog/Web site network, with the two search terms weighted by the importance (betweenness centrality) of the bloggers and Web sites. The bloggers/Web sites vote 52% for Eurozone survival, and 48% for Eurozone breakup. The crowd, measured through the tweeters , believes the opposite. The picture below shows the snapshot of today (11/27/2011) of the retweets about “euro survive” and “euro breakup”. The crowd on Twitter votes only 33% for Eurozone survival, with a decisive 67% of the vote for Eurozone brea...

Today (11/20/11) I ran a Condor twitter analysis for #ows (the Occupy Wallstreet Twitter tag) and #teaparty (the Tea Party Twitter tag), trying to predict public sentiment for these two social movements. I only collected retweets, and constructed the retweet-network, measuring the importance of people retweeting based on their social network position. The picture below shows the resulting network, each dot is a twitterer, each line is one or more retweets. Surprisingly we get three clear clusters, a Occupy Wallstreet cluster (blue, at the bottom), a Tea Party cluster (yellow, in the center) and a mixed cluster at the top. Red dots are people tweeting both about #ows and #teaparty. A closer look at these three clusters tells us that the blue cluster is Occupy Wallstreet sympathizers talking about issues near and dear to them, the yellow cluster is Tea-Party sympathizers doing the same about their cause, while the mixed cluster at the top consists of Occupy Wallstreet sympathizers badmou...

Last Friday night I had a great discussion with Billie Bivins, host of the show " Make Art...Feel Better " at the Belmont Media Center about creative swarming and the bees. She even got me to cobble together my own bee. Here is the link to the resulting video . Very cool.