Tweets per Second
This just in form the JP news wire…
“…if numbers weren’t important, there wouldn’t be any reason to celebrate them or any need for an attempt to inflate them.
The Tweet-per-second metric, for example, measures activity on a particular topic on the micro-blogging site, Twitter. Examples of events with record-breaking TPS rates include Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement, Steve Jobs’s resignation from Apple and subsequent death and the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. However, while the measure itself can indicate public interest in a topic, it does little to explain sentiment. The figure of 10,245 cited as the number of tweets posted per second during Madonna’s half-time show at the 2011 Superbowl, for example, tells us how many people were engaged with or interested in the performance; it doesn’t tell us is whether they liked or disliked it.
The same goes for virality, or the extent to which a post spreads online. The number of times a photo was shared on Facebook tells you only that – how many times it was shared on Facebook. What’s missing is why it was shared, in what context, and what captions and comments were attributed to it.
It seems that too often, traditional journalism doesn’t have the time, the means or the inclination to properly report on interactions taking place online, and so instead they report on the numbers. Figures are something that can easily and quickly be compared and contrasted, and are considered supposedly solid; the problem is that their meaning is often only skin deep.”
