Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Today’s post by Robert Scoble on the earthquake that rocked China brings out an important distinction about the nature of a distributed messenging service like Twitter. Scoble eulogizes over the speed of information delivery in his post, thrilled that he knew about the earthquake 50 miles from Chengdu three minutes before anyone else did:

I reported the major quake to my followers on Twitter before the USGS Website had a report up and about an hour before CNN or major press started talking about it. […] Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!!!

While this is a great leap in keeping the world informed about what is going on in any part of it literally at the speed of light, what Twitter does is let you share perception and opinion with the rest of the world. This is different than sharing facts about what is going on. For example, the USGS report which came out three minutes after Chinese citizens began twittering that there was seismic activity, is full of precise details:

Magnitude: 7.9
Monday, May 12, 2008 at 06:28:00 UTC

Location: 31.099°N, 103.279°E
Depth: 10 km (6.2 miles) set by location program
Region: EASTERN SICHUAN, CHINA
Distances 90 km (55 miles) WNW of Chengdu, Sichuan, China
Location Uncertainty: horizontal +/- 5.8 km (3.6 miles); depth fixed by location program
Event ID: us2008ryan

If you look at Robert Scoble’s twitter stream, what you get instead is a succession of misinformation, subsequent corrections, noise, predictions of doom, and frenzy:

• 06:37:49 - @dtan just reported an earthquake in Beijing. Wonder how large it is?
• 06:40:50 - @keso reported earthquake too. @dtan said it lasted 10 seconds. I’d guess it’s a 4.5 then.
• 06:41:21 - @michaelrice says it was a 7.8.
• 06:44:14 - @gaberivera says it’s 57 miles from Chengdu, which has 11 million residents.
• 06:57:46 - @jwalkerjr says to hold off on predictions. Well, I need to pass along my experience with earthquakes. This is a HUGE one.
• 07:15:20 - @casperodj just said it felt like the earth was going to split. Literally everything was shaking.
• For more just wade through the mud…

To his credit, you can get an impression of the event, as seen through his and others’ eyes. You can get an idea of the scope, and the impact it has had on people around the world. But, you can’t get trustworthy facts from listen to what the general public is saying in the face of a disaster. A calm rationality is needed that Twitter cannot provide.

Still, Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC is holding out hope that Twitter can mature into a real-time news service:

Let’s see, as this story unfolds, whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media, while allowing participants and onlookers to share their experiences.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that will happen. Twitter is fast, and it will let you share your experiences, but it will never replace solid journalism and hard facts. What do you think?

So far, the answer is clearly no. Go vote yourself on Expelled: The Movement’s website.

I saw this physics interview question pop up on the internet, and thought it might be worth discussing:

A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?

There are a number of forces here that apply: gravity, the force of the engines / airspeed / lift, and the drag of the wheels against the conveyor / the speed of conveyor. However, the wheels provide essentially a frictionless boundary between plane and ground; unlike car wheels, the wheels of an airplane spin freely in place. So, as the conveyor belt speeds up, the airplane stays in place, but its wheels spin at the same velocity. Furthermore, the lift of the airplane is relative to its airspeed, and its engines push against air. So, the airplane will accelerate forward and take off as normal.

The commenter “Max” has a nice summary as well: “A comparable example in my mind would be a car on a treadmill. If the car is being pulled along by a winch and the wheels are turning freely then the car is going to be pulled at an identical rate whether or not the treadmill is there or not (assuming as you did that the treadmill’s speed is inverse to that of the car).”

When John Graham-Cumming asked the question How Many Users Does Digg Have?, there were a few things he couldn’t tell you, since his data consisted of randomly self-sampled users. Well, with the power of two PHP scripts, we can pull large amounts of user data and form queries. Our first question is how has DIGG grown over time?

A graph of 187,054 digg users, randomly plotted against when they joined

This doesn’t tell us much, though, about how many DIGG users there actually are, or how active they are, so I plotted a histogram of the number of times these 200k users’ profiles had been viewed; the answer, unsurprisingly, is not very often in most cases:

83% of users had less than 50 profile views

And what about users who are active? How many people are digging stories every day? The answer is very few. I took a sample of 29,225 users from the previous sample (randomly) and used the DIGG API to query for their last digg. It turns out 31% (9125) had never dugg anything! After I removed those, here is the histogram I got:

About 15% of Digg users dugg a story in the last week

Concluding thoughts

Digg boasts an official tally of 2.2M users, but at most 20% of them can be considered real, active users. That would bring their user count down to 440,000, far far less than a popular web 2.0 boom child can boast about, and significantly hurting that $300M (or ~$700 a user) valuation that they keep trying to get.

Code Appendix

The {digg user, time joined, digg id, profile page views} information was gathered by the following script:

<?php
    error_reporting(E_ALL);
    ini_set(‘user_agent’, ‘My-Application/2.5′);
    ini_set(“include_path”, “.:/usr/share/pear”);
    require_once ‘Services/Digg.php’;
    require_once ‘Services/Digg/Response/php.php’;

    $base = ‘http://services.digg.com/users/?appkey=http://example.com&type=php’;
    $data = unserialize(file_get_contents($base.‘&count=0′));
    
    $total = $data->total;
    echo “There are $total total users\n”;
    echo “ID,Number,Name,Date,Views\n”;

    for($i = 0; $i < 1000; $i++){
        $offset = rand(0, $total - 100);
        $data = unserialize(@file_get_contents($base.‘&count=100&offset=’.$offset));

        $j = 0;
        foreach($data->users as $user){
            $page = @file_get_contents(‘http://digg.com/users/’.$user->name.‘/’);

            if(!$page)
                continue;

            preg_match(‘/id=”userid” value=”(\d+)”/i’, $page, $matches);
            echo $matches[1] . “,”;
            echo ($offset + $j++) . “,”; 
            echo $user->name . “,”;
            echo $user->registered . “,”;
            echo $user->profileviews .“\n”;
        }
    }
?>

As many of you know, Om Malik recently had a heart attack. According to a post made on January 3, 2008, he’s giving up the lifestyle that may have caused his cardiac arrest:

Now living a healthier life isn’t just one of my New Year’s resolutions, it’s doctor’s orders. Friends and family have purged my apartment of smokes, scotch and all my favorite fatty foods — I am even going to be drinking decaf. I won’t be refashioning my avatar’s stogie with a celery stick, but I will be taking better care of my health.

The New York Times published a piece about Om Malik’s heart attack which blamed blogging, which they quoted Paul Kedrosky as “a recipe for stress through the roof.” However, I’d like to make it quite clear that blogging is not bad for your health. Rather, another common problem in the United States–which some have called an epidemic–is probably to blame:

Om Malik, by Jon Arnold, under the bastion of fair use

Obesity. According to Obesity In America, “approximately 127 million adults in the U.S. are overweight, 60 million are obese and 9 million are extremely obese.” Blogging can be stressful, but it’s just a red-herring. Being overweight is a more likely risk factor for your heart’s health.

Best wishes to Om with his recovery. Best of luck in the new year with your new, healthier lifestyle!

Note that I’m not a Medical Doctor, and this does not constitute medical advice, nor does it establish any kind of doctor / patient relationship with you readers.