My interview on Social Media and Society: what I said (and what I didn’t)
My recent interview on the evolution of social media and its role in modern society is available on YouTube (in Italian only, sorry about that).
While the 3+ minutes of speech necessarily had to be a general overview on the role and recent changes of social media, I wish to summarise here the some technical aspects of it.
As I mentioned in the presentation:
- social media changed a lot since their early days, from being consumed on PCs to mobile devices, from general purpose social networks connecting friends to digital stages where we “sell” our life to the entire world, from places where to share personal information to platforms where to publish also objective information coming from the real world experience.
- social media are nowadays a valuable source of information for companies, who look for (and find) their customers through social media marketing and advertising, and public institutions and researchers, that can leverage on a large amount of data for providing benefits to our everyday life
What I didn’t say is how you can do that. Well, it’s pretty simple. The ingredients of the recipe:
- A lot of users sharing their profile
- A lot of content (photos, statuses, geotags, descriptions) shared by people
- (which makes up a VERY big data problem)
- crawlers capturing this (or stream capturing systems) and storage as needed
- MODELS of the context, the problem and the solution
- and DATA ANALYSIS TOOLS for studying the data and extracting meaningful information
To me, the most valuable points are MODELS and ANALYSIS TOOLS. We are doing a lot of experiments on mixing model-driven techniques with semantic analysis, NLP, and social media monitoring. One example of our experiments is the YourExpo2015 Instagram Photo Challenge.
Have a look and participate if you like. More on this coming soon!
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