How to make sense of social media information avalanche: SocialSensor

Monday 22 September 2014, 12:52

Nic Newman

is lead author, Reuters Institute Digital News Report

If you’re looking for a way to control an avalanche of information on social media, new tools are being developed all the time. Here’s how one of them, SocialSensor, represented the Scottish referendum (see the animated version of this):

SocialSensor's Scottish referendum coverage

SocialSensor is being developed with EU money, with help from our former BBC colleague Nic Newman. Nic is appealing for people to give feedback on the current beta version. We invited him to explain more:

Journalists are always looking for new angles and ideas and increasingly these emerge from social media.

But how do you keep track of the most interesting posts, pictures, videos and memes when this is happening at the speed of light and in multiple networks?

That's the problem we've been trying to crack with a new tool called SocialSensor.

The system, which has been developed to meet the needs of journalists, detects news trends from multiple social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr and Google+.

SocialSensor automatically surfaces the most ‘newsworthy’ and fast-moving trends. You can filter results by time, network, location, popularity, recency, or by the trust of those in the network. Journalists can also create their own 'followed topics' where additional social media sites or users can be added in a more focused way.

It's only a beta and currently only available for iPhone, but we're excited about the possibilities of this kind of cross-platform tool - in particular for journalists and communications professionals. We are also developing interfaces for casual news readers.

You can read more about our research and the approaches we have undertaken on our website.

This application has been developed as part of the SocialSensor research project co-funded by the EU.

You can download the SocialSensor mobile app.

We welcome feedback and ideas on how to develop and improve the functionality at socialsensor@atc.gr, or just leave feedback via the app or through the app store.