A useful tool of Social Media Analytics--------Python

# Python 3: Simple output (with Unicode)
>>> print("Hello, I'm Python!")
Hello, I'm Python!

# Input, assignment
>>> name = input('What is your name?\n')
>>> print('Hi, %s.' % name)
What is your name?
Python
Hi, Python.

After taking several courses, I have learned lots of skills about social media with both conceptual and technical aspects. To be honest, I didn't use python before this course although my major was computer science in undergraduate. But when using it, I find that it is much easier than any other programming language I use before, like C, C++, JAVA and C#. There's no doubt that each language has its own advantages but the most suitable and convenient programming language to analyze social media is only Python. 

So what is Python first?--------Python is a widely used general-purpose, high-level programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability, and its syntax allows programmers to express concepts in fewer lines of code than would be possible in languages such as C++ or Java. The language provides constructs intended to enable clear programs on both a small and large scale.

Python is easy to learn for the beginners. I have to say its advantages when using it. First I want to say it is simple. Reading Python program feels like just reading English so people can solve problems directly but not try to understand this language itself first. Secondly, I want to say it is easy to get started because Python has extremely simple documentation. Thirdly, it has a very good running speed with developed by C language and many standard libraries and third-party libraries are written by C too. Fourthly, Python is one of FLOSS, so users can publish this software's copy and change it personally or use it into new software. As high-level language, uses don't worry some bottom details like memory usage or some management of memory when using python. What is the most important I think is that Python standard library is really huge which can handle much work. I guess this is the reason why python is a best tool to analyze social media.

We did two assignments of Social Media Analytics already. One is to do statistics of the frequency occurrence of key words and another is to analyze the word in article belongs to which category. We can use some functions to solve it, like Sharding, Counting, Sort to solve questions directly and simply. 


Having Python, I become more and more interested in this course and love to program because we can not only to analyze some surface itself but also can move into essential aspects.

Comparison of several social media products

    Before I write next blog to analyze the technical aspect. I want to make some comparisons among some social media products using by us in our daily life in this blog.

QQ-QQ is an IM software based on Internet developed by Tencent. People can chat with someone they choose, or set up a group and invite persons to discuss some topics. Besides, people can share their feelings, opinions, or news and videos they love on QQZone. QQ own more than one billion users around the world and it made a breakthrough that there were two hundred million users online on 11th of April in 2014  at the same time. In one word, QQ is functional, wide-spread and powerful.

Wechat and Whatsapp-These two apps focus more on just chatting, especially Whatsapp which can only chat.Chatting in words and voice or sending photos are allowed. But one another function on Wechat is 'Discover', which people can share their own moments to their friends. Wechat is more popular in Mainland China but Whatsapp has users throughout the world.

Weibo, Facebook and Tweeter-These three social media tools concentrate more on information sharing. Users can follow people they're interested in and see their tweet. For example, many celebrities in sports, politics, entertainment, etc have blog. They upload their thoughts,daily life information or moments to the public. Fans can see directly and comment on it. Also, users can watch the news happening around the world.

    More and more social media platforms come up, which let the world be smaller and smaller. People can only use mobile phones, tablets, etc to get information they want.

       

       21st century is the time of social media.

Next blog I want to express my opinion about technical aspect of analysis of social media. :）

Social Media influences the world daily

After taking 4 times courses, I've changed my previous thoughts and become more sensitive when looking at people's comments on the web. Why I say this? When I read the news or watched videos on Weibo, Youtube or Wechat, I just did it but wouldn't take note of people's ideas and reaction. But things have changed now. Every time after getting news, I'm bound to read as many comments left by net friends as possible even if costs much time. In fact, I'm more interested in their comments than the material itself.

This is a magic course. GOD

Recently, OCCUPY CENTRAL is absolutely a big news in the whole world. Some people promote democracy which the leaders in HKSAR should have been appointed by a general election other than pre-decided.(In fact, the Chinese do not indeed choose their own president or premier because all government offcials are pre-decided.) I read a lot of news and focus more on people's ideas. I found that people are easy to follow one's idea which more people agree with it and lose their own thoughts. We learned from last Rosanna's course and she told us that it is called human interactions which means human thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. And I found this phenomenon occurs much easier on the young. And then I googled and want to find the reason. After reading some material, I think it has two reasons. First,  many young people have mix feelings of strong personality, confusion, lack of direction, immaturity in ideas which is the first but the most important reason. What's more, they're also afraid of being isolated if their opinions are different from their classmates or colleagues. This reason also can be explained in last Social Media class when most of us said line C was as long as the reference line, few students could hold different opinion with enough courage even they were right actually.

Really a useful and meaningful course.

My next task is to learn some programming skill so that I can analyze their comments with systematic understanding.

Watch PPT of Lecture Five tomorrow. Haha

First Impression of Social Media Analytics

After three times courses taken, I begin to be keen on this popular course with a kind and cheerful female professor ROSANNA.

Before taking this course, I am a little bit confused that what can I acquire in this course which its name sounds related to communication but not information engineering. Things changed my mind when Rosanna told us.

Social Media covers a wide range of aspects. In general, it's divided into two sides with Application side and Technical side. And in technical side, it goes to two branches. One is focus on engineering another that I should learn in this course is analysis.

So which aspects should I analyze in Social Media? First of all, Natural language processing is required so as to take sentiment analysis. Secondly, I should learn some mining algorithms to collect netizens' opinions towards some particular subject. So to a certain extent, people can use this method to predict the trend of stock with observing mass thoughts and then can forecast market trend. Some other aspects are mentioned such as network analysis, ranking, etc.

Hope can acquire more important and useful knowledge from this course. :-)

What is Social Media,

Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).(Select from Wikipedia)

Hello World.

哎哟，不错哟！