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)
