They gave us a link
here and you can find the global memology and the US-specific memology. The Y axis is labelled "Status update mentions ranked by growth (2010 vs 2011)." There are several small upticks in conversation that happened without making them into the top 10. They show actors, movies, tv shows, and fictional characters' ranks, too. The added tabs for music, sports, and news.
One might notice how many new conversations were struck up for these top-10 events by examining the difference between pre/post-event chatter and the chatter in the event itself. Some factors that we can consider influencing the difference include:
- lurkers making a post for the first time in a while
- actual discourse
- people joining Facebook just to talk(?)
- lots of reposts, copy/pastes, or likes (we do not know that like button hits are counted; are likes status updates or not?)
It is unfortunate that the full range of chatter-- what one would see on a normal basis-- is either so small that it is occluded by the large spikes (logarithmic Y axis would have helped here) , or was not actually included in the data. Perhaps when they say "2010 vs 2011" they mean subtracted conversations of 2010 from the 2011 data, ignored negative numbers (those would be events in 2010) and showed only peaks above a certain threshold (removed noise).
Oh for the raw data.
I finally got around to looking at this. I was disappointed in the data. The X axis is monthly when its obvious the events were daily. The y axis was missing a scale period so we only know relative relationships. As you pointed out we do not see normal chatter at all so we can not see how the meme's effect chatter or society at large. Wonder who can give us better data?
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