Sunday, February 03, 2013

Capturing the Zeitgeist: Superbowl Week 2013

Below is a word cloud created using status updates appearing on my Facebook timeline between Sunday, January 27th, 2013 and noon today.  This is what people talked about the week before Superbowl Sunday:
My Facebook Timeline, Jan. 27 - Feb. 3
A few remarks:

  • I'm really surprised people say "just" so much.  Most everything else seems about right.
  • I have over 300 friends, but (unsurprisingly) a disproportionate number do the vast majority of postings.  Withing that group, a select few are particularly long-worded, accounting for most of the text.
  • I only collected text from status updates, omitting anything showing up in comments to other posts (I still have a day job).  A lot of text was thus omitted.  Also, most postings were non-text: pictures or links to articles.  I'd estimate most links were political.  Of photos, 70% were babies, 29.9% were "what I ate for dinner", and 0.1% was everything else.
  • At one point my sense of Facebook postings was an endless cycle of "Can't believe tomorrow is Monday", "Can't believe it's Monday", "So don't want to go to work today", "at least the week's halfway over", "so happy tomorrow is Friday", "TGIF!!!  Is it time to go home yet?".  Repeat until retirement.  I was happy to see none of that this week.  

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