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Occupy

#OWS hashtag is evolving

November 24, 2011

Yesterday I was contacted by a reporter who wanted stats from our #OWS database to see how the movement was developing. I looked at the overall rate of tweeting with the tags #ows, #occupy, and #occupywallstreet, and found that it has been declining over the last 30 days. That is one possible story about the [...]

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Buddy Roemer becoming the Twitter Candidate

November 1, 2011

Have you heard about Buddy Roemer? He’s been running for president since the first big spike in the graph below, announcing on July 21st. Also known as the $100 candidate, Roemer’s main issues are government corruption and campaign finance reform. Refusing PAC money and limiting donations to $100 per person have been major limiting factors [...]

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Drilling down into #OWS hashtags

October 28, 2011

The #OWS database can do more than just show which tags are most popular. It can also let you see how these tags are being used and by whom. The starting point for this analysis is the Top Hashtags report. This report has two links for each tag. You can click the tag name to [...]

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Boost your tweet visibility with hashtags

October 27, 2011

One of the best ways to reach Twitter users who aren’t already following you is to make your tweets more visible in search tools, like search.twitter.com or Tweetdeck. The key is knowing which tags to include. The #OWS tweet database shows that thousands of different tags are used in tweets about the Occupy movement. But [...]

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#OWS tweet collection server dashboard

October 26, 2011

The starting point for the Occupy Wall Street tweet collection server is the dashboard. It gives you a quick overview of what type of data we are collecting and how much has been received from Twitter. 1. The Collection Keywords section shows you which terms are being requested from Twitter. The current results show that [...]

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#OWS tweet collection restarted on a new server

October 24, 2011

Last week we tried collecting all tweets for the Occupy movement, but found that the flow was too much for the server we used. There were twice as many tweets containing #ows, #occupy, and #occupywallstreet as for the entire 2012 election. We moved this system to a much bigger server, and started it again this [...]

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We’re going to need a bigger server

October 17, 2011

It doesn’t look like the server I’m using for tweet collection can handle the flow of tweets with #ows, #occupy, and #occupywallstreet. The load got too high, so I stopped the data collection. I’ll have to move this system to one of our bigger servers later this week. But we did collect data for 3 [...]

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Browsing the @4More tweet collection database

October 17, 2011

Now that the database code for collecting tweets based on Occupy hashtags is running, the next step is creating a simple browsing interface that will let us drill down into these tweets. This is usually written as a back-end tool for our own use, so it doesn’t have the wizzy interface of a site like [...]

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Tweet Collection for @4More Engagement

October 17, 2011

Zach has laid out the overall strategy behind the @4more account. Now its time to build the database foundation for this Twitter engagement campaign. The first task for an engagement campaign is setting up a server to collect tweets based on the right keywords. These tweets will let us discover the most influential accounts, along [...]

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Will Occupy movement lead to another tech wave?

October 14, 2011

The Occupy Wall Street movement has gained the attention of the political world, and there is much speculation on its possible effect on the 2012 election. Personally, I find the potential technological outcome even more interesting. The parallels between the unemployed activists behind Occupy and the unemployed technologists who backed the Howard Dean campaign in [...]

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