Two Topics for Further Research?

This last week's reading has all been extremely interesting, but two articles in particular struck me as ones that could have been even more enlightening if a bit more analysis of the data had been done. The first was the article about influence on Twitter. Within the article, they considered influence by number of followers through analyzing the transmission of shortened URLs through twitter but as far as I can tell they never took into account the fact that a person's influence decreases the more people their followers are following. I would have loved to see information on what happens when you normalize followers but vary the number of followers those followers have and they seemed to have the data to do so.

Another topic that could have been a bit more enlightening was the research paper on culture as reflected in books. They could have weighted the "strength" of each book by the number of copies purchased, making it so that Jimmy Bob's farm manual didn't have as much of an effect as Harry Potter or the Bible. A book is only as influential as it is read, after all, and book sale statistics have long been touted as a way to approximate just how much of an effect a novel is having on a society. While the results are still extremely interesting I think that might have made the data a bit more reflective of overall cultural shifts. If I had the analytical tools I would definitely sift through the data with that in mind; it seems like it might help analysis. Also, it would be interesting to do a similar analysis of the top 200 or so internet sites or forums as time goes on in order to see how language online has shifted over the past dozen or so years. I'm sure Google has that data archived somewhere, given their penchant for keeping track of anything and everything they possibly can.