I suspect that there were many people like myself, who had no idea what a Vuvuzela was about a week ago. Now it seems that the web can’t stop talking about them.
There’s a Facebok App, an iPhone app, a single purpose Twitter account. They’ve pissed off Hitler, and Mashable yesterday reported about “Vuvuzela-Time.co.uk, an amazing website that adds a soundtrack composed of vuvuzela goodness to every site you visit.” Yes, amazing!
Twitter is no exception. Over the last week the site has been going into meltdown, crushed under the weight of World Cup tweets and frequent topic of conversation are those ‘bloody horns.’ So I spent a bit of time in the last few days pulling together some data, and it would seem that people on Twitter think that Vuvuzelas are annoying.
To get a sense for the volume of discussion out there, I conducted an English language search for the word ‘Vuvuzela’ every day from 11 June – 17 June 2010. The daily estimated volumes look something like this, for a total of 310,232 tweets in the last week:
Then I downloadeded a sample of about 5,000 tweets each day since 11 June. That is a total of:
- 35,000 Tweets
- 570,143 words
- 1,299 pages in a Word document
Then I chucked them it into Wordle, restricted it to the 50 most prominent words and got this:
Obviously, there is quite a lot more of analysis that can be done with this, but the fact that the words ‘ban’ and ‘annoying’ pop up in the top 50 of over 570K words sends a pretty clear message.
NOTE: It’s worth mentioning that I removed variations of ‘Vuvuzela’ and ‘RT’ from the word cloud because when these words were included, it skewed the image fairly drastically.
