iSpam

It seems that my prediction about buzz was pretty much on the money. iPhone buzz jumped to 1.4% yesterday (launch day). The thing is all over TechMeme and Tailrank. A new part of the story which I haven't read elsewhere yet is iPhone spam. I received an email with the text 'AT&T has activated X's new iPhone, the number is...' I'm not sure if this was generated via the set up process, or if it was hand rolled. The fact that it mentions AT&T suggests the former.

It is probably worth pointing out the case for NLP in the context of buzz monitoring. How would you surface all the blog posts from people who now own an iPhone? A keyword approach is going to be inaccurate. A few searches on Technorati for 'bought iphone' or 'my iphone' demonstrate this. Being able to pull out the type of relationships that Powerset talks about is the way to go.

I notice that Cymfony has a position open for a computational linguist. It has been interesting to track the transformations both BuzzMetrics and Cymfony have undergone post acquisition (by TNS and Nielsen respectively). A cursory review of their websites suggests that Cymfony is racing ahead. Expect a deeper dive on this competition a little later on.

Comments

[Pete]

Nice call, Matt. What do you estimate 1.4% means as a total number of blogs? (e.g. almost a million by Technorati stats - perhaps more like 350K for the number tracked by Blogpulse?)

[Matthew Hurst]

Pete,

This number is a percentage of blog posts, not blogs. Ball park, if you assume approx 1MM posts per day, then that would mean 14k posts. I think we can also assume that many bloggers postsed multiple times abou the iPhone, thus the number of bloggers talking about this would be less.

BTW, note that the final tally from BlogPulse is closer to 1.3%. This number is a little different (and more accurate) as it includes a moderate number of posts that were not yet ingested at the time of the previous post.