Was Monday the first “duvet day” of autumn?

“Defo feeling a duvet day with lots of movies” – one of many popular sentiments expressed on Twitter last Monday as the UK’s disappointing summer entered autumn.

Unlike many ideas about large social movements and information sharing networks, there are events which numerous individuals experience independently but at a similar time. This is not an ‘information cascade’ – or the idea of ‘going viral’ – where experience passes from one user to another. It is seen when expression of independent signals from individuals with common thought or experience are captured and aggregated.

Independent signals, in effect providing social intelligence as demonstrated by this review from Kenya and Google Flu trends, show the potential for organisations, philanthropists and investors to locate potential indicators of success or impact.

Still early days, and plenty of work to be done refining the techniques used to analyse data, and identifying the most important indicators of human behaviour.

So, Monday 24th September may well not be noted in history for it, but it seems likely to have been the first duvet day of this British autumn.

Duvet Day, what are people talking about…?

… mostly staying under or being wrapped up in a duvet.

Removing the standard ‘noise’ words we find the weather being a common factor alongside the lure of hot chocolate, hot water bottles and watching films or DVDs:

The #tags people use to consciously identify the content or their tweets, show similar emphasis.

The volume of tweets shows a relatively constant stream of discussion.

Early on comments focused on people going to work (or not), subsequently there were tweets about having a duvet day rather than going to school, and later college. Tweets also provide updates on what people were doing during their duvet day – including watching ‘jezza’ (Jeremy Kyle).

Final thought on duvet day; there were very few users who were mentioned frequently. (Names have been obscured due to the likely age of some users – as their tweets were about school).

This is in part that ‘duvet days’ is not an issue space which is likely to generate wide ranging discussion with people a user doesn’t know reducing the potential for an information cascade. However, it is an example of capturing and aggregating signals of independent experience.