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Exploring the OECD website
BBC News A new website from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is a great way to investigate statistics about almost anything to do with … |
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Transmission is a lightweight BitTorrent client built in GTK, with a clean and simple interface. Although most people prefer more popular clients like Vuze, Deluge or KTorrent, Transmission incorporates all the major features one needs for downloading torrents and can prove a very good alternative to those, especially if you don’t need all those whistles and bells.
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Mobile banking solutions firm Monitise announced a five-year global strategic alliance agreement with payment and credit services giant Visa to develop a suite of mobile services, including payments, money transfers, transaction alerts and marketing offers. Per terms of the deal, Visa will acquire a 14.4 percent stake in Monitise valued at $13 million. Monitise services enable customers of multiple banks and mobile operators to perform banking and payment transactions directly from their handsets–the firm offers live services in the U.S. and the U.K. in partnership with Metavante and VocaLink. Its banking partners include HSBC, Lloyds TSB and Royal Bank of Scotland, while carrier partners include Vodafone, Orange, O2, T-Mobile and 3.
For more on the Monitise/Visa deal:
- read this release
Related articles:
Visa introduces Android mobile payment app
Visa expands m-payment services
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Retweeting, as we explained in our article How To Retweet on Twitter, has evolved as the main way to reshare content you like on the social media service. There’s also a great deal of data we can glean from retweeting behavior, as we outlined in the article The Science of Retweets.
But apart from the obvious, what makes a retweet different from a tweet? What makes some types of tweets get shared more than others? And what can you learn from that data if you’d like to get retweeted more?
This week viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella dug into the data on retweets and published some interesting stats about retweet behavior. These help us understand why people retweet things, and might help you too.
1. Retweets Contain More Links
Retweets tend to contain a link, Zarrella explains – 56.69% of retweets contain a link versus 18.96% of normal tweets. So retweets are being used to share content from around the web.
Key point: If you’d like to get retweeted, include links in your tweets more often.
2. Longer Words / More Syllables
Retweets also appear to have more syllables per word than ordinary Tweets – tweets have an average of 1.58 syllables/word, versus retweets at 1.62 syllables/word. This isn’t necessarily what you’d expect, since the most viral ideas are often said to be the simplest ones.
Key point: Using long words is not a barrier to getting retweeted – in fact it seems to help.
3. Higher Reading Grade / More Complex
Another unexpected finding, perhaps: Zarrella found that retweets require a “higher level of education to understand” – 6.47 years of education versus 6.04 years according to the Flesch-Kincaid test. The graph also shows the Simple Measure of Gobbledygook test, which found similar results: 6.13 years of education for retweets versus 5.88 years for tweets.
Key point: Tweets don’t have to be stupid-simple to get retweeted.
4. More New Words and Concepts
Perhaps unsurprisingly, retweets tend to add new information. By creating a “novelty” score that counted how many times a word appeared in the entire sample versus in the retweets, it was found that retweets tend to contain more unique words.
Using a sample size of over 10 million tweets, Zarrella discovered that “in the random Tweet sample, each word was found an average of 89.19 other times, while in the ReTweet sample each word was only found 16.37 other times. This shows us that while simplicity may not be very important to ReTweetability, novelty certainly is.”
Key point: If you want more retweets, try adding new information.
5. Less Self-Referential
Also unsurprising: retweets tend to be less self-referential than ordinary tweets. In other words: talking about what you had for breakfast is less likely to get retweeted than talking about what Obama had for lunch. This was found using the LIWC (“Luke”) method, which is a little complex to explain here but you can learn more on the site. Another LIWC finding: people tend not to retweet swear words.
Key point: Don’t talk about yourself too much if you’d like to be retweeted.
So there you have it: if you want to get retweeted, don’t talk about what you had for breakfast, don’t swear, and throw in a useful link from time to time.
Mashable’s Best Retweeting Resources
If you’re looking to continue your education in the art of retweeting, then we encourage you to read some of our most popular Twitter and retweeting posts:
- How To Retweet on Twitter– Ben Parr offers a primer on how retweeting works, plus tools to retweet more efficiently and track the most popular retweets.
- The Science of ReTweets– Dan Zarrella explains which factors make certain tweets more viral than others.
- Retweet iPhone App for Twitter– Our review of the Retweet iPhone App.
- 15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends– Covers some of the best tools for tracking trends on Twitter.
Reviews: Twitter
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Ideally, your brand has the same name across all of the social sites you use, and, it matches your domain name (for example, we’re mashable.com, twitter.com/mashable, and facebook.com/mashable).
Realizing this fact, popular domain registrar GoDaddy has integrated Twitter registration into its domain manager, allowing you to see if the Twitter username that matches your URL is available, and if so, register it.
The target here is GoDaddy’s small business users. The company explains in the tool that you can “Join today and start “tweeting” about your next sale, when you’ve updated pictures on your site, or other things that may be going on with you or your business.”
To use the feature, just login to your GoDaddy account and click on any of your domain names to access the manager (where you also go to do things like update name servers). There’s now a Twitter option under “Domain Enhancements” from which you can check your username availability.
While this probably isn’t a big deal for most our readers, it could be for Twitter. This integration puts the service in front of millions of people that are actively managing their online identity, many of whom have probably heard of Twitter, but haven’t actually signed up for the service. As if being featured on Oprah and on the cover of Time wasn’t enough free publicity …
Reviews: Twitter
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 Examiner.com |
Small business growth and local economic impact: Alameda County …
Examiner.com It was founded in 1953 and according to its website has delivered millions of loans, contracts, counseling and other forms of assistance to small businesses … |
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This course will help you understand the benefits of LDAP as well as implementation of LDAP. The OpenLDAP Project is a collaborative effort to develop a robust, commercial-grade, fully featured, and open source LDAP suite of applications and development tools.
With 3.3 million+ YouTube views in the past two days, the video “Unknown Lifeform in North Carolina Sewer” (below) is taking the web by storm, becoming the most viewed video this week and beating out a performance of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The clip, which shows an alien-looking life form living in a North Carolina sewer, was posted along with a claim that it was extra-terrestrial life.
Today mainstream news has taken notice and corrected the myth: the video is indeed real, scientists say, but the strange creature is very much a terrestrial phenomenon. News14 writes:
Ed Buchan, environmental coordinator at the Raleigh Public Utilities Department, said staff biologists have confirmed that the “creature” is actually a colony of tubifex worms. The colonies attach themselves to roots that gradually work themselves into weak points in the pipes. “They seem to respond to the light from the camera,” Buchan said. “That light is pretty hot.”
The worms naturally occur in sewage and pond sediment and are actually sold both live and dried as fish food in pet stores. He said other staff members in the department have seen it before, although sightings aren’t particularly common. “I’ve seen a lot of sewer TV before and I’ve never seen them,” he said. “We were surprised. We didn’t know immediately what it was.”
It’s unclear what made the clip such a YouTube phenomenon: most likely it’s explained by the mystery surrounding the strange creature, much like last year’s Montauk Monster mystery.
Reviews: YouTube
Tags: creature, lifeform, youtube
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IBM is announcing on Tuesday availability of an open source machine learning compiler, which the company said intelligently optimizes applications, thus meaning shorter development times and bigger performance gains.
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Meet Jonathan Ive, the product designer behind the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone. Article
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