Blog: MySpace

Hot Tags and the Tags Related to Them

Think about the news you track and the issues you need to stay on top of on a daily basis. For me, one of those topics is social networking. There are often thousands of stories about social networking published every day with perhaps hundreds of different angles to them. Maybe somewhere in those thousands of stories and hundreds of angles is an emerging trend – major research on its impact on job hunting, a new technology or service that the blogosphere is drumming up, or the use of these networks by a new segment of the population. But how can I spot the trends in all that news?

Well, graphing the news can help. When you look at the incidence of a word in the news and can see the rise and fall of its use on a day-to-day basis, you can tell if a subject is gaining momentum in the media. However, seeing the rise and fall of a word’s incidence does nothing to help determine why it’s getting more or less attention. To figure that out you need more information. One way to do this is to look at words related to the hot topics in the media.

This graph shows the mentions of MySpace in the media from July 8 to July 30 (data from Trendio.com*). You can see that there is a slight spike toward the end of the chart and that mentions for MySpace peak at 164 on July 27. But why? 

Television was it in 1960, talk radio was it in 1992, and the internet was it in 2004. But what will be the breakout technology in this year’s election and in the 2008 presidential election? The internet will likely play an even bigger role but new technology will replace the communication and outreach tools that were deemed so revolutionary just a few years ago. A lot of people are betting that this new technology will be online social communities led by MySpace and YouTube.

Yesterday George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet hosted a discussion on politics, online social networks, and their connection. Everyone agreed that politicians – and nonprofits and advocacy groups – should be on these websites.