Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

End of Year Data: Facebook Currently Leads

Like me, John Battelle was underwhelmed by offerings from Twitter summarizing a year of tweets.

Nah. After reviewing them, it's clear that Twitter's first trends release is, well, a bit predictable. But I am sure there is really interesting data locked behind that rather obvious facade....we just can't see it. Yet.

John has similar things to say about YouTube’s offering:

Everyone's doing it! YouTube's most watched came out this morning. Again, nothing that eye opening. Wish they'd dig deeper.

Facebook, on the other hand, while not quite showing the same sort of data, is not afraid to dig deeper. The data teams post includes:

• Proportion of Minorities on Facebook in the U.S.
• Ethnic Breakdown of Facebook Users in the U.S. Named ‘LEE”
• Facebook U.S. Population by Ethnicity
• Relative Saturation of Ethnicities on Facebook in the U.S.

All of these are trended over time :-)

Clearly, the intended audiences are different, but hats off (again) to the Facebook data team.

For those of you who’d like to see trending over topics, here’s a sample from BlogPulse:

 

Who cares about the pandemic, some guy left his flies open!

YouTube by the Numbers

Tim Wintle of Rubberductions forwarded me a pointer to a new piece of research which analyses viewership for YouTube videos in the first month. Key findings:

In the first month on YouTube

• 70% of videos get at least 20 views
• 50% of videos get at least 100 views
• Fewer than 20% of videos get more than 500 views
• Fewer than 10% of videos get more than 1, 500 views
• 3% of videos get more than 25, 000 views
• Around 1% of videos get more than 500, 000 views

These numbers are described by the following chart:

YouTube: Hurley versus Chen

The graph below shows mentions of either the YouTube founders in context where the other is absent. The first peak is around the acquisition, the second around the OgivlyOne Digital Media Summit and the third around the Davos World Economic Forum. From here, it certainly seems that one of the founders is getting more attention - at least from the blogosphere - than the other.

A second graph, below, shows simple mentions of the founders (this time I've included Karim). Again, a distinction can be seen between Hurley and Chen.

A little more investigation shows that the variations of Chen's name are important to capture.

The above graphs, however, seems consistent with the hypothesis that Hurley is the one they send off to high visibility public events. Again, here is a graph which looks for exclusive mentions.

Brin and Page have been far more consistent in their attention.

Google, YouTube - In Pictures

Update: I've updated this post with a more current version of the trend graph.

The wait is over - here is the article from Time:

(MOUNTAIN VIEW)—Google Inc., announced today that it has agreed to acquire YouTube, the consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community.

Colbert, YouTube

So, why is Colbert pulled from YouTube, but Bridges isn't?

Popular Video Ranking on TailRank

Kevin, in a comment on this blog, points out that TailRank actually had video ranking first, they just didn't publicize it well. Have a look at http://tailrank.com/posts/filter/handle/_video. There are some noticable differences. TailRank looks at more than just references to YouTube and includes at least Apple and Google Video - though the data is swamped by YouTube. Technorati's service has a shorter window giving a view of the last 48 hours compared with TailRank which has a window of several days (at least 5).

Looking at the current results:

TailRank	Technorati
The Simpsons Movie - Teaser	PeCa bio hazard highlight
danah on O'Reilly Factor	Real Life Simpsons Intro
Pictures of Assholes	guitar
Brandon Hardesty's Re-Enactment Series	El Koala - Yo Via Jase Un Corra
Gamers Getting PWND	Leprechaun in Mobile, Alabama
President Bush's Nephew Interviewed in Iraq (what if?)	Bush Was Right
Leprechaun in Mobile, Alabama	Unreal Gamer
The Promise - Trailer	dani california
Bill Gates: "We need microformats"	Nintendo Sixty-FOOOOOOOOOOUR
United 93 - Featurette	Gintama first commercial

It looks like there are considerable differences in the data - probably due to different crawling strategies - only two of the videos are found in each list.

[Previous post on this topic is here.]

Technorati Releases Video Rankings

Technorati has a neat new page which lists the most popular YouTube videos. I guess it was never a matter of when a page like this would appear, just a matter of who would get there first. Congratulations to Technorati! I wonder if we will see this picked up by the memetracker crowd as well. Currently, the model in that space is to filter by content type (giving us, for example, different flavours of Memeorandum and TailRank filtered by tech, politics, etc.) The video list suggests a different model which is to filter by the media type (similar to BlogPulse' filtering by blog and news links).

YouTube: Unifying Social Media

YouTube references are exploding in the blogosphere. However, it is interesting to note that YouTube is exploding in board space and usenet as well. Have a look at this graph, which plots the percentage of links to youtube.com in boards, blogs and usenet:

Natalie's Back

Seems you can't keep a good clip down.

YouTube: All Your Eyes Are Belong To Us

The rise and rise of YouTube:

Approximately, the blue line represents mentions of YouTube and the yellow links to YouTube and probably YouTube hosted content. Perhaps BlogPulse needs to have a new ranking for just YouTube videos.

BTW, look at the comparison with Google video links:

How much of YouTube's success is to do with the use of a Flash delivery device and low resolution resulting in low barriers to viewing?