Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

3D TV Is Coming

Last weekend I had my first experience of a 3D TV. Originally I had thought this was going to be a non-starter, but having seen several video games, nature clips and sports clips I'm a believer. Blogpulse suggests that there is a clear upward trend of interest.

Charting HTML5

I've been playing around with HTML5 to see what it offers for rendering charts. Thus far I've not attempted anything too bold, just basic time series rendering and some event based changes to the rendering. If you have an HTML5 capable browser, please take a look. If you don't, I was going to recommend you take a look at Google's Chrome (which I'm using to write this), but it keeps crashing on this page so I'll leave the choice up to you!

[The data shows sea levels for certain locations in the us in MM; the data is from here, and originally from the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory.]

For more on time series data, read posts on d8taplex, or visit the site: d8taplex.com.

Hyperlocal Vacation

Seattle's Capitol Hill Blog has an interesting post which analyzes visitor traffic from outside the US. The blog generally gets a high concentration of traffic from the Seattle area, so seeing this vacation traffic gives an idea of where Capitol Hill readers go on their spring vacation.

Hyperlocal Update

Briefly, a couple of hyperlocal related topics from the past week:

• Fwix - an aggregator of local content - has formed a relationship with NYT to provide content to a number of its smaller, local properties. Aggregated hyperlocal content provides a path for traditional media to scale both in terms of markets and in terms of costs.
• SeattlePI has an interesting article covering a number of hyperlocal blogs in the Seattle area.

Twitter Spam - What is it?

Abdur over at twitter has an interesting post about Twitter's fight against spam. The information in the post is summarized by this graph:

The problem with Twitter spam (other than the existential one) is that because Twitter is such a great platform for novel communication behaviours, it has blurred the definition of spam. For example, say I visit a site which is offering me free downloads of music (sweet!). To get at the goodies, I have to allow the site to post on my Twitter acount a message saying that I downloaded a certain track from that site. That message goes out to my network, with the intention of getting them to visit the site as well.

Is that spam?

Spam is also dependant on the mode of consumption. If I follow a certain brand or outlet and it feeds me tweets about deals, we may both benefit. If I search and find nothing but links from thousands of accounts that the brand has set up to push such information is that spam? It sure looks like it.

While Abdur's graph says something about the fight with spam, what it doesn't say - i.e. what constitutes spam in Twitter and how such a taxonomy break down across tweets - is perhaps more interesting. Twitter does have some information here about their spam reporting system. I wonder if we could see a break down of the fight by the types mentioned there.

I think that with the complexity of interactions that Twitter allows, spam is more an experience than a fixed type of data.
 

Text and Geography - We Are Hiring

We are hiring:

Bing Maps and Mobile has an appetite for local data: from the latest restaurant reviews to business listings, from geosocial gaming to hyperlocal blogs. We are growing our team of engineers and scientists that focus on acquiring, mining, reasoning about and leveraging this data wherever we find it. The team is positioned to have impact in all application areas including search, mobile and mapping.

We are looking for strong researchers and developers who are interested in linking web data, including hyperlocal content, to meaningful interpretations of the world. Text and data mining skills are key (including NLP) as are strong engineering skills. Above all, a passion for all things local, social and mobile.

 

MyGreenLake is Green Lake

Now that we have MyGreenLake.com added to our set of Seattle hyperlocal blogs, it is nice to see the area filling out with stories (visit our hyperlocal application on the Bing Maps site - you may have to adjust the neighborhood to Green Lake as hyperlinking to the site has a few glitches in it).

If you own a hyperlocal blog, or are a fan of one you'd like to recommend, send me an email, or tweet me (use #locallens or #hyperlocal), and we'll get them added to our list. Currently, we are only serving content in 10 cities, but that will soon change.

Spam Email has a 0.000008% Conversion Rate

An interesting and direct infographic from New Scientist reports that spam emails have something like a 0.000008% conversion rate. Seems small, but a single botnet produced $3.5 million dollars worth of sales.

[Original article is here]

PEW: The State of the News Media - Interactive

The PEW Project for Excellence in Journalism has an interesting interactive presentation reviewing the content and attention of news media in 2009. Users can select news sources (e.g. NPR, Cable TV, etc.) and view and compare the topics that these sources focused on in 2009.

Even better, you can embed the charts. Compare, for example, NPR and Talk Radio.

MSN Gets Hyperlocal

Briefly, MSN is now surfacing hyperlocal blog content (originally found in the Local Lens application on Bing Maps) in the Local Edition area of the site. Currently this is only available in the ten cities that Local Lens covers, but that will change...