Re: What constitutes a micropost?

Hi Leon,

thanks for bringing this up. IMHO, the definition of what is a micropost is
mostly related to the effort involved in the user activity that is in the
origin of a micropost. The lower the effort, the more micro the post is.

While the low-effort publishing is, IMHO, a defining property of
microposts, what drives the activity of our research community here is the
fact that microposts impose further challenges in the treatment and use of
their content, that is often poor if taken alone, and often needs to be put
in some context or considered together with other (micro)posts or content.

What about if it's an update that contains a brief
> abstract of a longer piece, and the longer piece is the real content

I would say the only reason to ask this question is the size of the
abstract, that IMHO is not essential for calling it a micropost. Is it a
result of a low-effort activity is the question we should ask.

where's
> the boundary?

I do not think there is any use of defining where the boundary is. There is
simply more and more microposts in the mass of user-generated content, and
the challenges related to treating that content have to deal more and more
with the consequences of low-effort publishing, resulting often in poor
informational content of the posts. Solving those challenges is what
matters more then the precise boundary itself, but your question definitely
helps define the scope of the field, wich IMHO is centered around the
low-effort.

Then you can rightfully ask, what is low-effort? I'd say the boundary is
fuzzy. I once took Ryan Air. They say (and people still consider it so) it
to be a low-cost company. Yet they over-charged me the overweight and
charged a lot for printing my ticket, which in the end costed more then to
go with Air France (not a low-cost company).

Milan Stankovic
Director R&D, hypios.com

http://research.hypios.com
Office phone +33 1 77 13 67 79
Cell phone +33 6 50 56 67 36
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personal homepage: http://milstan.net
personal blog: http://milstan.net/blog
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On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 4:23 PM, Leon Derczynski <leon@dcs.shef.ac.uk>wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> What constitutes a micropost? There seems to be a general consensus
> that a tweet is generally a micropost and that a blog post is not, but
> rather a full "post". What are the distinguishing qualities of a
> micropost? Do Facebook status updates count? How about the (generally
> longer and rarer) Google+ status update? To what extent does ease of
> publication outweigh post length? How about the amount of
> purpose-generated and automatically-generated / automatically
> regurgitated content (for example, when an article is linked in to an
> update or comment) - does this have an impact on whether or not a post
> is a micropost? What about if it's an update that contains a brief
> abstract of a longer piece, and the longer piece is the real content
> (e.g. automatically generated tweets from new blog posts) - where's
> the boundary?
>
> All the best,
>
>
> Leon
>
> --
> Leon R A Derczynski
> NLP Research Group
>
> Department of Computer Science
> University of Sheffield
> Regent Court, 211 Portobello
> Sheffield S1 4DP, UK
>
> +44 114 22 21931
> http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~leon/
>
>