Swarm Creativity Blog

Today I decided to do some mid-term presidential elections coolhunting. Looking at the exchange of negative attacks between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, I was curious if I would see some reflection of this on Twitter, Blogs, Web pages, and online News. According to realclearpolitics aggregated polls , Obama was ahead in the polls today with 47% against 44.6% for Romney. The picture below shows today's tweets containing "obama president 2012" and "romney president 2012", confirming the polls: Each blue dot is a twitter user tweeting about Obama, each green dot is a twitter user tweeting about Romney, each red dot is a user tweeting about both. A connecting line means that a twitterer is retweeting another user. The dot labeled "obama president 2012 0.615" shows that the accumulated weight of the twitterers about Obama is 62%, while the dot labeled "romney president 2012 0.55" illustrates that the Twittersphere gives Romney a weight of 55%...

The more active Wikipedia Editors a country has, the better is the health of it's economy! Different national cultures are reflected in Wikipedia editor behavior. In a hierarchical culture like Japan, there are a few senior Wikipedia editors who keep a tight rein on who is allowed to edit articles. In a more egalitarian culture like Sweden, a much higher percentage of active Wikipedia editors obtain the coveted Wikipedia Admin status. In this project we find a relationship between intrasocial capital of countries and the structure of the Wikipedias of the matching European languages. In the context of the current economic crisis we compare success of an economy with the Wikipedia editor behavior of the corresponding country. The German, French, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Greek, Swedish, and Finnish languages are predominantly spoken in just the mother country, allowing for a one-to-one mapping between Wikipedia in that language and economy of the mother country. We obtained differ...