Information Trade Metrics

If we think of information as a commodity being traded across the nations, then each country can be thought of as a producer and consumer of information. But in order to be able to characterize the information trade on Twitter, we need to first have a method to quantify the information being traded. There are a number of metrics that we are considering and they all bring out different aspects of the information tade on Twitter. On a very basic level, these metrics can be categorised as quntifying the number of the tweets or the URLs being exchanged. Currently for this map visualization, we are looking at the metrics based on the tweets being traded. Next, we give a short description of the metrics used for the purpose of generating the maps for this visualization.

Total Tweets Produced (TTP)

 The TTP is the total number of tweets which are produced by the users of a country.

It is quantized as
      (Avg. Tweets produced per day by a user) ,
summed over all the users in a country.

Gross Tweets Produced (GTP)

 The GTP can be looked at as the effective impact that the tweets produced by the users of a country have globally.

It is quantized as
      (Avg. Tweets produced per day by a user) X (No. of followers of the user) ,
summed over all the users in a country.

Gross Tweets Consumed (GTC)

 The GTC gives a measure of how the tweets being produced are being consumed across the world.

Trade Imbalance

 The Trade imbalance is the difference between the amount of effective tweets being produced and consumed by a country.

It is quantized as
      (GTP -GTC) .

For each of these metrics the per capita value is determined by dividing the metric by the total number of users of that country.



This is a simple visualization of the trade of tweets or information both across and within the national boundaries. For a description of the project, please take a look at this.

Click on each country to take a look at which are the top 5 producers of the tweets being consumed by a country or the top 5 consumers of the tweets being produced by a country. Also you can see the trade imabalance for each country by clicking on it.