Lately Jim Harris made a thought provoking post on the Mike2 blog. The post is called A Contrarian’s View of Unstructured Data.
Herein Jim wrote:
“My contrarian’s view of unstructured data is that it is, in large part, gigabytes of gossip and yottabytes of yada yada digitized, rumors and hearsay amplified by the illusion-of-truth effect and succumbing to the perception-is-reality effect until the noise amplifies so much that its static solidifies into a signal.”
Indeed, the sound of social data may be like that. Yesterday I wrote a post called Keep It Real, Stupid. Herein I mentioned an apparently fake quote by Albert Einstein saying:
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”.
Today I tried to see how the fake quote was doing on Twitter.
OMG: Going on more than one tweet per minute along with some mutations of the quote saying:
“If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself”.
“You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother”.
OK folks: Sense-making of social data is not going to be simple. Not even relatively simple.
Right:
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
This is like a sophisticated game of telephone. I wonder if you could overlay these tweets with the twitter following network in order to infer how the quote (and the mutations of the quote) actually spread.
Thanks for commenting Jesse. Oh yes, maybe that will make sense.
Henrik. Couldn’t you have explained this simply? 🙂
Reblogged this on Geek/Husband/Dad/Catholic.