MA Debuts Political Video Barometer

In the US, social network analysis firm Morningside Analytics (MA) has built a new tool to measure how YouTube videos are moving through political blogs and social networking sites.

The Political Video Barometer measures the most popular videos in both the US conservative and liberal blogospheres, and analyzes how long they have been around, how many bloggers link to them from each side, as well as how many people have viewed each clip.

Videos shown in the Barometer are chosen by queries against a large database created by the firm's network analysis engines, and then a 'crawler' visits millions of blogs and collects their contents and links.

A program mines these links and uses advanced graph mathematics to group the blogs in two criteria: how blogs link to one another, and what else do the bloggers link to in common.

MA calls these 'Attentive Clusters' - communities, large or small - which are then mapped for analysis into what the blogs in a cluster have in common.

Still another program feeds the Barometer by scanning around 16,000 blogs every six hours, looking for new links to YouTube videos (or YouTube videos embedded into the blogs). By counting these links, the firm says it is possible to analyze which videos political bloggers are promoting.

This week the system has shown that with the help of 180 liberal bloggers, the pro-Obama remake of the Budweiser commercial 'Wassup' rose to the top of the Political Video Barometer, and gained most of its audience from non-political bloggers.

Morningside Analytics was founded in New York City in 2007. Its methods draw on social network analysis to which it adds statistical techniques and data modeling.

Web site: www.morningside-analytics.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.