Subscribe to this feed via RSSReblogs and content sharing on Tumblr: a personal network analysis (via Hautepop)
I don’t know Jay IRL, but he’s a she.
(Having read her blog/research for a bit, she will find this exchange amusing.)
Anyway, good posts, both of you! :D
*moonwalks out of room*
I’m a little late to this post by Jay Owens at hautepop but I just noticed it in the top posts listing on our Union Metrics topic tracker for mentions of “Union Metrics” (meta!).
It’s a very nice analysis. He actually breaks things down an awful lot like we do in our Union Metrics post reports. Except, of course we present the reblog data as a tree with generations out to the right vs the (cool) radial presentation he uses.
He nails it with the discussion of downstream engagement as well. I think one of the most fascinating things about Tumblr is that you can actually pinpoint who caused amplifications downstream. This is unlike Twitter where all retweets are “flattened” into a single list against the original tweet. We’ve seen this go absolutely insane; including things like a post by Barack Obama where reblogs occurred out to 109 degrees removed from the original post.
And, he’s absolutely right about the challenges of analyzing the Tumblr data. I feel like it’s really only possible if you consume the entire firehose like we do (~100MM events per day). Unlike Twitter, Tumblr can’t easily be segmented by basic keyword queries into a sane stream. Instead you have to do joins across original posts, reblogs and likes.
On a side note, he does get it wrong in calling our analytics “top level” and “aggregate. We actually provide details on exactly who is engaging, what tags are resonating and what posts are getting a response. We go so far as to show you the top 100,000 posts, tags or users in the web interface (if there’s that much activity) and give you full-on exports of *all* of the data. And, as I said above, you can get that level of detail for individual posts as well. We do all this for individual blog engagement and for keyword-based entire topics tracking millions of posts.
For comparison with Jay’s radial trees, here’s one of our reblog trees from a post report:
