"This is Tumblr’s moment. It’s almost equivalent to when Truman realized that he could address the nation directly on television to make a presidential address – here’s a new form of media to reach an audience."
- Gregory Galant, as quoted in For pols, Tumblr is trending - POLITICO.com (via rachelfershleiser)
(via jeremyjohnstone)
"Real wealth creation results from finding and developing new and better solutions. So, the idea of cutting education in public schools, universities and research institutions would be antithetical to solving our problems. In fact, cuts to education and research could be catastrophic for the tech industry, which is for the most part a function of the skills of our workforce. Adversely affect the education system, and the tech industry suffers and wealth creation suffers as well. We need a political approach that promotes education and research in order to cultivate talent, encourage the talent to stay in the U.S., and help grow our advantages in technology."
- Dean Rotchin, president and CEO, Blackjet | The 8 Missions That Should Dominate Obama’s Technology Agenda
The Union Metrics real time visualization tracking the top election tags & posts per second on Tumblr as CNN projected Obama the winner. (via my iPhone)
Our hack day Tumblr project was such a hit we decided to take it live!
Check out our visualization of trending election-related tags on Tumblr! We built this during our Union Metrics Hack Day yesterday. You can see the full version here.
These are the top tags in Tumblr posts and reblogs about the election. Our visualization classifies tags according to political party, so Republican-related posts are red, Democrat-related posts are blue, and non-affiliated posts are gray. The size of the circle relates to how many posts have included that tag in the past few seconds.
The visualization refreshes in real time according to what’s trending right now, and is built off the full firehose of Tumblr data by Union Metrics. We make Union Metrics for Tumblr, which is Tumblr’s preferred analytics provider.
Chart: When A Tumblr Post Goes Viral - Business Insider
Union Metrics and Tumblr announced today they are cooperating on the “first full-fidelity” Tumblr analytics platform for marketers… Here’s what a viral campaign post for President Obama looks like once it takes off inside Tumblr.
"Paul Ryan was not chosen because he was the most popular candidate on Twitter (he wasn’t). We already know Twitter isn’t very good at predicting that kind of thing - just look at the GOP presidential selection or the recent Mexican presidential election, where the most popular candidates on Twitter were not the ones who won. This is not a case of a public decision made by popular opinion. Instead, this is a case of a decision made behind closed doors by experts who were in the know, and the truth slowly but definitively leaked out through the tweets."
Did Twitter just predict Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s running mate?
Update: Twitter was right. It’s a Romney-Ryan ticket.
We hinted that we’d been tracking Republican VP Candidates with the screenshot accompanying the announcement of our new dashboard earlier this week. As you can clearly see from the updated dashboard below, Ryan started to pull away from the potential VP pack three days ago in terms of unique reach on Twitter. Of the pool of likely candidates, Ryan’s seen the greatest increase in reach over the past month, gaining a 65% increase in reach in the past 30 days. In addition, he’s seen the largest gains in both the number of total tweets and unique people talking about him recently.
(via TweetReach Blog)
"Only 49% of graduates from the classes of 2009 to 2011 had found a full-time job within a year of finishing school, compared with 73% for students who graduated in the three years prior."
What happens when you give Kindles to kids in Ghana? Results:
- Kids learned to use e-readers quickly even though 43 percent of them had never used a computer before. Also, not surprisingly, they were quick to discover “the multimedia aspects of the e-reader, such as music and Internet features.”
- Near-zero theft. Only two e-readers (out of 600) were lost in the whole study, partly because “community involvement was encouraged through e-reader pledges, community outreach programs, and support from community leaders.”
- Kids got access to way more books. Before the study, primary-school students had access to an average of 3.6 books at home. Junior-high students had access to an average of 8.6 books at home and high-school students access to an average of 11 books. With the e-reader program, kids had access to an average of 107 book.
- Primary school students’ test scores improved, but effects on older kids were less clear. The reading scores of primary-school students who received e-readers increased from 12.9 percent to 15.7 percent. But results for older kids were mixed.
- Students sought out access to international news. “Amazon data revealed that students were downloading The New York Times, USA Today, and El País etc., demonstrating that students want to access a wide range of reading materials that were previously inaccessible.”
- Kindles break too easily. Worldreader had not predicted how many Kindles would break: 243 out of 600, or 40.5 percent.
- The program appears cost-effective. Worldreader estimates that “for the years 2014-2018, using a calculation focused strictly on the provisioning of textbooks, the e-reader system would cost only $8.93-$11.40 more per student over a 4 year period [$0.19 to $0.24 per month] than the traditional paper book system.”
