Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

December 15, 2014

Tweet Steganography?

Filed under: Image Understanding,Security,Steganography,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 1:34 pm

Hacking The Tweet Stream by Brett Lawrie.

Brett covers two popular methods for escaping the 140 character limit of Twitter, Tweetstorms and inline screen shots of text.

Brett comes down in favor of inline screen shots over Tweetstorms but see his post to get the full flavor of his comments.

What puzzled me was that Brett did not mention the potential for the use of steganography with inline screen shots. Whether they are of text or not. Could very well be screen shots of portions of the 1611 version of the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible with embedded information that some find offensive if not dangerous.

Or I suppose the sharper question is, How do you know that isn’t happening right now? On Flickr, Instagram, Twitter, one of many other photo sharing sites, blogs, etc.

Oh, I just remembered, I have an image for you. 😉

kjv-genesis

(Image from a scan hosted at the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (UPenn))

A downside to Twitter text images is that they won’t be easily indexed. Assuming you want your content to be findable. Sometimes you don’t.

TweepsMap

Filed under: Mapping,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 8:43 am

TweepsMap

A Twitter analysis service that:

  • Maps your followers by geographic location
  • Measures growth (or decline) of followers over time
  • Listen to what your followers are talking about
  • Action reports, how well you did yesterday
  • Analyze anyone (competitors for example)
  • Assess followers/following
  • Hashtag/Keyword tracking (down to city level)
  • You could do all of this for yourself but TweepsMap has the convenience of simply working. Thus, suitable for passing on to less CS literate co-workers.

    Free account requires you to login with your Twitter account (of course) but the resulting mapping may surprise you.

    I didn’t see it offered but being able to analyze the people you follow would be a real plus. Not just geographically (to make sure you are getting a diverse world view) but by groupings of hashtags. Taking groups of hashtags forming identifiable groups of users who use them. To allow you to judge the groups that you are following.

    I first saw this in a tweet from Alyona Medelyan.

    December 14, 2014

    Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Search

    Filed under: Facebook,Instagram,Social Media,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 7:07 pm

    Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Search by Olsy Sorokina.

    From the post:

    For the past decade, social networks have been the most universally consistent way for us to document our lives. We travel, build relationships, accomplish new goals, discuss current events and welcome new lives—and all of these events can be traced on social media. We have created hashtags like #ThrowbackThursday and apps like Timehop to reminisce on all the past moments forever etched in the social web in form of status updates, photos, and 140-character phrases.

    Major networks demonstrate their awareness of the role they play in their users’ lives by creating year-end summaries such as Facebook’s Year in Review, and Twitter’s #YearOnTwitter. However, much of the emphasis on social media has been traditionally placed on real-time interactions, which often made it difficult to browse for past posts without scrolling down for hours on end.

    The bias towards real-time messaging has changed in a matter of a few days. Over the past month, three major social networks announced changes to their search functions, which made finding old posts as easy as a Google search. If you missed out on the news or need a refresher, here’s everything you need to know.

    I suppose Olsy means in addition to search in general sucking.

    Interested tidbit on Facebook:


    This isn’t Facebook’s first attempt at building a search engine. The earlier version of Graph Search gave users search results in response to longer-form queries, such as “my friends who like Game of Thrones.” However, the semantic search never made it to the mobile platforms; many supposed that using complex phrases as search queries was too confusing for an average user.

    Does anyone have any user research on the ability of users to use complex phrases as search queries?

    I ask because if users have difficulty authoring “complex” semantics and difficulty querying with “complex” semantics, it stands to reason they may have difficulty interpreting “complex” semantic results. Yes?

    If all three of those are the case, then how do we impart the value-add of “complex” semantics without tripping over one of those limitations?

    Osly also covers Instagram and Twitter. Twitter’s advanced search looks like the standard include/exclude, etc. type of “advanced” search. “Advanced” maybe forty years ago in the early OPACs but not really “advanced” now.

    Catch up on these new search features. They will provide at least a minimum of grist for your topic map mill.

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