Whistle blowing site Wikileaks yesterday published thousands of pages of secret US military documents relating to the Afghanistan war. This has been dubbed the “biggest intelligence leak of all time” and provides the most detailed picture of the conflict to be drawn to date. Working in partnership with newspapers The New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel to publicise the leak shows both social and mainstream media working together to set the news agenda. This is likely to have serious political consequences. The true impact of the publishing of these documents is yet to be established.
Last week university researchers in Boston released a Twitter ‘mood map’ charting the sentiment of Tweets across the USA on a typical working day. The team from Northeastern University rated different words as displaying different levels of either positive or negative sentiment. These sentiment scores were then divided into US states and times of the day to create the mood map. It shows that early morning positivity was replaced by a more negative mood as the working day draws on.
It is possible that some words could have been taken out of context and that sarcasm wouldn’t be taken into account with such systems. Computer scientist John Mislove, who worked on the study, admits that the “simple approach” could lose some of the subtleties of sentiment behind Tweets. What is incontrovertible though, as stated by Steven Gray of University College London, is that “Twitter offers researchers a unique, live data set that changes by the minute.”
As buying decisions are increasingly taken based on customer reviews and feedback online the threat of malicious, spam or fake reviews is growing. Most people implicitly trust that online reviews are genuine though there is little to stop rival companies posting untrue negative reviews about your products. This has led some companies to offer guidance to help those affected.
The British monarchy was widely reported to have joined photo sharing site Flickr. A range of current and historical images are available on the page.
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