- How Twitter Stores 250M Tweets a Day Using MySQL (High Scalability) — notes from a talk at the MySQL conference on how Twitter built a high-volume MySQL store.
- How The Atlantic Got Profitable With Digital First (Mashable) — Lauf says his team has focused on putting together premium advertising experiences that span print, digital, events and (increasingly) mobile.
- Data Mining Without Prejudice — an attempt to measure fit without pre-favouring one type of curve over another.
- It Is No Longer OK Not To Know How Congress Works (Clay Johnson) — looking for a specific innovation to try and change the way Washington works by the time Congress votes on SOPA is about as foolish as Steve Jobs trying to diet his way out of having pancreatic cancer.
"Twitter" entries
Visualization of the Week: Visualizing SOPA tweets
A huge visualization captures tweets from the SOPA protest.
This week's visualization comes from Fred Benenson, who ranked and mapped tweets related to the SOPA protest.
The Transportation Security Administration's QR code flub
Prank or mistake? A QR code on a TSA poster links to a non-TSA site.
Fred Trotter discovers that a QR code embedded in a TSA poster at the Orlando airport links to justinsomnia.org, which is about as far as you can get from a government website.
Four short links: 20 December 2011
Maximum MySQL, Digital News, Unbiased Mining, and Congressional Clue
Four short links: 14 December 2011
PHP Virtual Machine, Archive Your Tweets Easily, Prioritize Your Links, VC Memes
- The HipHop Virtual Machine (Facebook) — inside the new virtual machine for PHP from Facebook.
- PHP Fog’s Free Thinkup Hosting (Expert Labs) — ThinkUp archives your tweets and other social media activity for you to search, visualize, and analyze. PHPFog hosts PHP apps scalably, and I’m delighted to be an advisor. Andy’s made a video showing how to get up and running with ThinkUp in 3m. (This is impressive given how long I squinted at ThinkUp and swore trying to get it going on my colo box just a year ago)
- The Secret Lives of Links (Luke Wroblewski) — notes on a talk by Jared Spool. On the Walgreen’s site, 21% of people go to photos, 16% go to search, 11% go to prescriptions, 6% go to pharmacy link, 5% go to find stores. Total traffic is 59% for these five links. The total amount of page used for these 5 links is ~4% of page space. The most important stuff on the page occupies less than 1/20th of the page. This violates Fitts’s Law. Makes me think of the motor and sensory homunculi.
- VC Memes — the success kid is my favourite, I think.
Strata Week: The looming data science talent shortage
EMC study looks at the state of data science, Carrier IQ and big data, and the welcome return of old tweets.
In this week's data news: EMC's new data science study predicts a data scientist shortage, why Carrier IQ is part of a "bizarre big-data triangle," and DataSift will soon offer access to an archive of old tweets.
Four short links: 8 December 2011
Hedonometrics and Twitter, Pricing Experiments, Crowdsourcing App Dev, and Flashcard Library
- Temporal Patterns of Happiness and Information in a Global Social Network: Hedonometrics and Twitter (PLOSone) — Tweets involving the ‘fake news’ comedian Stephen Colbert are both happier and of a higher information level than those concerning his senior colleague Jon Stewart. By contrast, tweets mentioning Glenn Beck are lower in happiness than both Colbert and Stewart but comparable to Colbert in information content.
- Pricing Experiments You Can Learn From — revealing the data from experiments which showed how to drive people towards higher prices.
- 10 Things I Learned at CrowdConf 2011 (Crowdflower) — Using his newly released crowdsourcing platform Coffee & Power, Philip [Rosedale] developed his entire company infrastructure and platform through a globally distributed workforce. 288 contributors in 127 locations worked together to get this startup off the ground in a whole new way. The Coffee & Power platform was built in 1,700 commits ranging from $6 quality checks all the way up to full source-code editing. One element of this process was developing the Hudat iPhone app. In less than a month for $2,485, the Coffee & Power community got this mobile app up and running.
- Andi — AGPL3-licensed spaced repetition flashcard system. (via Jack Kinsella)
Top Stories: November 28-December 2, 2011
Info overload vs. consumption, how big data is shaping business, and why we need the "paperless book."
This week on O'Reilly: Author Clay Johnson explained why information consumption, not overload, is what needs to be managed. Also, Alistair Croll looked at the relationship between business intelligence and big data, and Todd Sattersten made a case for the paperless book.
How Twitter helps a small bookstore thrive
Omnivore Books follows a simple Twitter rule: 1/3 personal, 2/3 professional.
Learn how Omnivore Books, a cookbook store in San Francisco, uses Twitter to solidify relationships with customers and break through the publisher blockade.
Strata Week: Why ThinkUp matters
ThinkUp and data ownership, DataSift turns on its Twitter firehose, and Google cracks opens the door to BigQuery.
Data democratization gets an important new tool with the release of ThinkUp 1.0. Also, DataSift offers another way to get the Twitter firehose, and Google offers a little more access to its BigQuery data analytics service.
Data journalism and “Don Draper moments”
Alastair Dant on how tech, data and narrative come together at The Guardian.
The Guardian's Alastair Dant discusses the organization's interactive stories, including its World Cup Twitter replay, along with the steps his team takes when starting a new data project.