Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Featured Hyperlocal Post #1

This is the first in a series of posts intended to highlight great hyperlocal blog content. I'm going to start off with a post from a local favourite : MyGreenLake. Green Lake is a neighborhood close to where I live. It is very popular, especially in the summer months, as a destination for park activities (around the lake) and also the general cafe/bistro/pub scene.

In Green Lake's Streetside Gardner: Takin' it to the streets, Erica Browne Grivas reviews the opportunities and responsibilities of urban gardening at the neighborhood level. What makes this a great hyperlocal post is the inclusion of rich photographs, some real, knowledgeable advice, and the use of addresses. This last point is especially important from an aggregation and distribution point of view as it provides hooks for services like EveryBlock and our own Local Lens to identify specific locations.

Take a look at the post to see Green Lake burgeoning!

You can find more hyperlocal content on Bing maps in the Local Lens application (silverlight required).

It's always a risk to start a series of regular topical posts, so let's see how long I can keep this up.

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.

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.

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...

Bing Maps Updates Hyperlocal Application

Today we pushed out a modest update to our hyperlocal application Local Lens. Users won't see a huge difference, but behind the scenes we have improved our text mining systems which recognize and map entity names (e.g. restaurants, museums, coffee shops) and addresses. In addition, some other changes will have improved coverage in a few areas (such as Capitol Hill in Seattle).

Below, in a post from SF Appeal's The Alley, we pull out one of the more complex address expressions.

With the tight integration between Bing map apps and the full mapping platform, clicking on the address expression brings the user directly to the location mentioned, providing us with intimate context.

  

For a look at the future of mapping, take a look at Blaise' latest TED talk on the Bing Maps ecosystem.
 

West Seattle Blog going Mobile

I just noticed that the West Seattle Blog- a well established hyperlocal blog in Seattle - has either rolled out, or is testing a new mobile theme.

 

At the bottom of the page is a button to switch the mobile setting off, but it doesn't appear to have any effect, so I suspect this what we are seeing is the testing of a new mobile site for the blog and that they are experiencing a few glitches. Strangely, when I visit this from my iPhone, I get the non-mobile version of the site.

See my related post on 2010 - The Year of the Neighborhood.

2010 - The Year of the Neighborhood

As the geosocial revolution continues - creating more and more intimate links between the digital space and our physical spaces via mobile devices and data driven services - the word 'neighborhood' is becoming more and more prominent. A neighborhood (in urban terms, larger than a block, smaller than a zipcode) is the perfect granularity to connect with users as we spend a good chunk of our time there.

'Near by' is often scoped by neighborhood, our schools define catchment areas at this level, supermarkets serve neighborhood sized portions of the population.

As we see the rise of geosocial gaming (things like Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown), and the mechanisms they introduce being adopted by other spatially aware services (Yelp) we are also seeing the rise of the importance of real estate data. It is in no way surprising that Google is interested in the real estate market.

NabeWise, a new neighborhood review site, similar in some regards to both EveryBlock and Centerd. It's just opened its doors with coverage for New York and San Francisco, and its entry points are qualities of neighborhoods (trendy, singles, beautiful people, etc.). It is very interesting to note that the sign up process includes the question 'are you a real estate agent?'

Design-wise, many of these sites have to address the presentation of rich data in an understandable and consumable manner. In this regard, these resident oriented sites have similarities with real estats 2.0 sites (RedFin, Zillow, Trulia) and take advantage of the increased data literacy of a younger, web 2.0 savvy audience.

Key in all of this is the bedrock data set of neighborhoods. As the LA times demonstrated with their Mapping LA project, the definition of any neighborhood is somewhat subjective and borders need to be negotiated. For many cities, Wikipedia keeps rich pages describing neighborhoods and their histories.

From a UX point of view, we can expect to see more interfaces with elements like these, sampled from some of the companies above (NabeWise, Trulia, EveryBlock):

Two Hyperlocal Experiments

Having been heads down in shipping Local Lens on Bing Maps, quite a bit of my hyperlocal enthusiasm has rubbed off on those around me.

My good friend Todd and I have put together a simple experiment in community communication. Hyperloco is a blog with (links to) zoomable images of local message boards. Using Photosynth, we have stitched together a couple of boards. If you are interested in contributing, please either send me some images (with the location of the message board you have captured) or upload the images to Photosynth and send me a link.

Wakako has been taking pictures with her iPhone and has put together an iPhone based photoblog of Seattle. Wakako has a really good eye for evocative moments. Take a look at her pics at iPhone 片手にシアトル散歩 (Seattle Sanpo iPhone version).

Local Lens: Bing Gets Hyperlocal

Today Microsoft rolled out a new version of our map site. There are many new features to explore. Firstly, the site is entirely powered by Silverlight. This means that the user can explore mapping and local data with the full power of deep zoom technology – a more sophisticated look and feel. Secondly, the platform has been re-architected to deliver an extensible set of features via an application framework. For example, traffic is not a feature of the map control itself, but an application that is running in the mapping framework.

While the mapping base layer may look familiar to most users, the zooming model now demonstrates the complete integration of maps, overhead imagery, oblique birds-eye imagery and, new to Microsoft, Streetside imagery. The Streetside imagery introduces a novel 3d experience which allows for a richer and more immersive experience.

One of the applications that is rolling out in this new framework is Local Lens. This application provides access to hyperlocal blog content by identifying key blogs associated with cities and neighborhoods, and by analysing their content to understand the locations (addresses, businesses, neighborhoods, schools, etc.) that are mentioned in their posts.

You can access this application through the gallery of applications by clicking on the

in the lower right hand corner of the left hand pane.

Local Lens, along with a number of other applications, can then be enabled by hitting the application card.

Local Lens covers a number of major US cities and allows navigation down to the neighborhoods within those cities. Here, for example, is a view of West Seattle. Each pin point represents a location (or several locations) mentioned in one or more blog post.

The shaded area under each pin represents a clustering of proximate locations. By interacting with the pin, you can access a mini browser showing summaries of the posts:

The left hand pane can be used to page through days of posts and to access a fuller reading experience.

When a post is selected in the left hand panel, locations are highlighted. Interacting with these highlights will emphasize the location on the map and a click will navigate you to that address, business or neighborhood.

Note how the pins are carried through to the streetside images to provide access to local content right on the street:

In addition to the hyperlocal application, check out the Twitter mapping application.

Additional commentary here.

Update: here is a nice video introducing the new system.