Analyzing Labor Data Via Facebook Status
from the the-power-of-public-status dept
Sean over at the 463 blog has a cool post comparing mentions of "hired" vs. "laid off" on Facebook wall postings, and noticed a bit of a trend:Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: labor data, recession, social networking, status
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More like Bushwacked.
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Another Source
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A lot of companies invest quite a bit in market research type activities. Seems that Twitter mining could offer a unique view of.. well, everything.
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Since the internet tends to skew towards slightly younger and slightly more affluent people, the numbers would tend to be off.
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I can envision situations where you'd want to mine this segment though. Apple might be one example. Any companies targeting programmers might be another (Portions of Adobe or Microsoft for example).
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you are missing the point, people
of course, if you are a professional researcher or an economist you are going to weigh for statistical and demographic inconsistencies, etc. you also know that there are a lot of terms possible that will have different impacts.
one of the points of this is that the ability to measure the thoughts and impulses of many millions of people is available to anyone with an Internet connections. You only need about 45 seconds on your hands (that's the time it took me). You won't get perfect results, but what do you expect?
and, if Joe Blow can do this now, what could those mentioned professional researchers, advertisers and economists do once versions 2, 3, 4, etc come out?
and, btw, all this said, try to tell me that this chart doesn't paint an interesting picture.
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Re: you are missing the point, people
This sort of data is remarkably unreliable, because you are depending on people to tell the truth, the same people who are using screen names, VPNs, and all sorts of other stuff. About as trustworthy as asking inmates about how to be model citizens.
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But yeah, the trend lines are not indicative of any specific trend in the economy, even though they are interesting to see. If you through in the S&P short term market rally across this graph you'd see it is actually rising as the hired & fired trends are falling (mid March the rally started and continued strong through May, now is rolling off). This could tell you many companies are getting their resources in line (manpower to needs), but it could also tell you nothing at all.
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