{"id":1621,"date":"2012-07-19T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-07-19T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/?p=1621"},"modified":"2012-07-23T17:49:03","modified_gmt":"2012-07-23T07:49:03","slug":"atnix-australian-twitter-news-index-week-282012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/2012\/07\/19\/atnix-australian-twitter-news-index-week-282012\/","title":{"rendered":"ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, Week 28\/2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve just published an article about our first few weeks of ATNIX results over at The Conversation<\/a><\/em> \u2013 but here, we\u2019re already pushing ahead with the next week\u2019s index. This one, I\u2019m afraid, suffers from \u2018difficult fourth week\u2019 syndrome, though: we collect our data using a server based at the fabulous NeCTAR<\/a> initiative, a shared cloud-based server infrastructure for Australian researchers. NeCTAR is a very welcome project, but still suffers from some teething problems \u2013 and over the past week our server became unresponsive on several days, resulting in gaps in our data gathering.<\/p>\n

To complicate things a bit further, the Twitter<\/em> data gathering tool which we use for most of our work, yourTwapperkeeper<\/a><\/em>, is able to fill in some<\/em> of the missing data after a restart by searching for recent tweets through the Twitter<\/em> API \u2013 but this works reliably only for relatively low-volume search terms. What this means is that the different sites we\u2019re tracking are differently affected by these outages: for the minor news and opinion sites, yTK<\/em> will have been able to plug the gaps relatively easily, by retrieving the few dozen tweets which passed it by during a server outage lasting a few hours; for major news sites such as the Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> or the ABC, however, the volume of tweets per hour is simply too large to go back and find all the tweets we might have missed.<\/p>\n

So, take this week\u2019s ATNIX Twitter<\/em> news circulation results with a grain of salt, especially for the leading sites \u2013 we\u2019ll be systematically undercounting their prominence this time around. We hope to have addressed these issues now, so that there won\u2019t be a re-occurrence of these problems in future weeks.<\/p>\n

Standard background information:<\/strong> this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain \u2018button\u2019 retweets, but manual retweets (\u201cRT @user \u2026\u201d) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au\/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of \u2018opinion\u2019 link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au\/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include \u2018\/opinion\u2019 in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.<\/p>\n

See the posts tagged \u2018ATNIX\u2019 on this site for a full collection of previous results.<\/a><\/p>\n

ATNIX Week 28: 9-16 July 2012<\/h1>\n

In total, we gathered some 134,000 tweets containing links to our tracked sites this week; if past weeks are any guide, that\u2019s somewhere between 6,000 and 26,000 tweets which we\u2019ve missed due to our server issues. The marketshare overview for news sites clearly shows that this data loss affects mainly the leading, most frequently shared news sites:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When normally, the Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> receives some 20% of all the links to news sites, this week that percentage drops down to 16% \u2013 not because readers are turning away from the SMH<\/em>, but because we missed a good chunk of those tweets. The same is true for ABC News and some of the other news leaders, while data for the lesser news sites will have been less affected by our outages. That said, it\u2019s also worth noting that in spite of these problems, the top of the leaderboard has remained stable for yet another week \u2013 we\u2019re seeing a picture of some very well-entrenched user loyalty emerge here.<\/p>\n

Amongst opinion and commentary sites and sections, there\u2019s a similar shrinkage of the leaders\u2019 marketshare which is likely to be due to our technical problems rather than any inherent changes in user habits:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here, though, we do also see some of the more fluid ranking which we\u2019ve already observed over the past few weeks: the opinion sections of The Age<\/em>, and blogs.news.com.au<\/em>, drop several spots, while other sites increase their relative prominence. And as in previous weeks, some of the minor sites chalk up a handful of individual points \u2013 so, for example, the normally rather dormant Courier-Mail<\/em> opinion section had a big winner on 10 July with a piece arguing against the common talking point that Julia Gillard \u2018lied\u2019 about carbon pricing before the 2010 election<\/a>. On most days, the paper\u2019s opinion pieces are lucky to receive a double-digit number of tweets mentioning them; that day, it came in at just above 100 tweets.<\/p>\n

Daily Patterns, Weeks 25-28\/2012<\/h1>\n

This brings us to the daily patterns \u2013 and here, the impact of our outages becomes most obviously apparent (I\u2019ve shaded the problem days in grey in the graphs below):<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The top five or six news sites, in particular, are strongly affected by our technical problems; their daily share of link circulation on 11-15 July is nowhere near where we\u2019d come to expect it to be based on the previous weeks\u2019 results. From the Daily Telegraph<\/em> onwards, though, relative levels of visibility are about where we\u2019d expect them to be \u2013 here, yourTwapperkeeper<\/em>\u2019s ability to back-fill data it missed seems to have made up for most of those outages.<\/p>\n

The same is true for opinion and commentary links:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

While levels for week 28 aren\u2019t that far away from the previous week, it should be noted that week 27 was an unusually slow week for opinion pieces. Next time around, we should expect to see those figures rise again by some margin, I should think \u2013 and we\u2019re very much hoping not to see a repeat of our server issues then\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve just published an article about our first few weeks of ATNIX results over at The Conversation \u2013 but here, we\u2019re already pushing ahead with the next week\u2019s index. This one, I\u2019m afraid, suffers from \u2018difficult fourth week\u2019 syndrome, though: we collect our data using a server based at the fabulous NeCTAR initiative, a shared … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, Week 28\/2012”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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