But what exactly is ‘Flaming’? According to Urban Dictionary, it
involves posting emotive, negative messages to provoke an angry
or enraged response on social networking sites. Slovenian and
British researchers say it will result in your posts receiving a
much higher response rate. The New Scientist reports that the
research used “sentiment analysis” to identify emotional content
on posts left on the BBC’s online forums and with Digg.com. By
running algorithms that looked for emoticons, emotional keywords
and misspellings, the researchers calculated happiness scores
for the posts and found that those with a lower score tended to
participate in longer conversations. So if you are the kind of
social networker who wants to generate more interest and
followers, you’re better off writing negative comments than
saying ‘I love this!’ It is typical of human nature to create
social groups out of negative feelings, for example often hash
tags like #whyrelationshipsdontlast are more successful in
trending on Twitter tha