[LINK] What Creates a Twitter Trend

[Tom Koltai]

Not-withstanding that according to the latest Comscore Report, Twitter
in the under 17's is on the decline with youngsters now passing their
urgent updates via Facebook @ 4 billion per day... 

I thought Linkers might still like the results of this empirical data
result [N=40 day period] with retweets being the causational reason for
rapidly trending topics [no surprise] and here's the big surprise:

Rupert Murdoch was right. Google was wrong.

HP Researchers have concluded from the following paper that "traditional
media (CNBC/CNN etc) still starts the conversation around the
most-discussed topics in social media, not the other way around." 

Trends in Social Media : Persistence and Decay

Authors: Sitaram Asur, Bernardo A. Huberman, Gabor Szabo, Chunyan Wang  
(Submitted on 7 Feb 2011)
Quote/
Abstract: Social media generates a prodigious wealth of real-time
content at an incessant rate. From all the content that people create
and share, only a few topics manage to attract enough attention to rise
to the top and become temporal trends which are displayed to users. The
question of what factors cause the formation and persistence of trends
is an important one that has not been answered yet. In this paper, we
conduct an intensive study of trending topics on Twitter and provide a
theoretical basis for the formation, persistence and decay of trends. We
also demonstrate empirically how factors such as user activity and
number of followers do not contribute strongly to trend creation and its
propagation. In fact, we find that the resonance of the content with the
users of the social network plays a major role in causing trends. 
/Quote
http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/trends/trends_web.pdf

Cornell Cite: http://arxiv.org/abs/1102.1402