Does chatter matter?

Is online chatter just noise, or does it contain information? Albert Saiz from the Wharton School thinks there is quantitative information content in internet chatter. In an IZA seminar in Bonn yesterday entitled Downloading Wisdom from Online Crowds he argued:

The internet consists of billions of opinions. Focusing on unstructured internet chatter, we investigate if there is any quantitative informational content in such massive amounts of cheap talk. We develop a technique that integrates information from the internet by quantifying relative amounts of chatter. We find the relative frequencies of internet chatter in reference to major social phenomena in a geographic area to be highly correlated with actual demographic and economic empirical data frequencies.

We exemplify the power of this technique by computing measures of corruption for countries, states and cities. These not only proved highly correlated with ratings of experts, but also allowed us to replicate the results in published papers establishing correlates of corruption. We discuss extensions and limitations of this approach.

Unfortunately the paper is not online yet, but I will post a link when it is.

Comments

[Edward Hugh]

Hi,

Just to draw to your attention that there is a little bit of debate going on around John Kay's recent article of Italy and the euro. Sebastian at Eurozone Watch Blog started it off, but then Felix at RGM, me and Claus have joind in. I thought maybe you might like to add your 4 pennyworth.

http://www.euro-area.org/blog/?p=26

Regards

[A. PERLA]

"We exemplify the power of this technique by computing measures of corruption for countries, states and cities. These not only proved highly correlated with ratings of experts ..."

Online "chatter" describes the level of corruption in a country?

Will wonders never cease ...

[Web Design Kent]

What is cool about Chatter is that it puts social info and collaboration into the workflow of real business applications. This is the promise of social computing in the enterprise, and it does require infrastructure / infrastructure investment. Not only will it drive productivity, any enterprise that does not social-enable or make collaborative its applications will not be able to function in the not too distant future. After all, it is people that are working with these apps and the more informed and connected they are and the more streamlined the work, the better.