At the height of the Cold War, I was a 15-year-old farm boy and I was half convinced that we were heading for a scenario straight out of “The Day After” or, at best, a “Red Dawn”. The Russians were kicking our ass at hockey and, according to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, our farm was in
The Oncoming Social Data Analysis Revolution
November 1, 2011 – 2:04 pm
Last Wednesday I was thrilled to be able to speak at the Infopresse conference at L’Excentris. Apart from being included amongst some of our brightest and best, I was able to present for the first time my talk called “The Oncoming Social Data Analysis Revolution”. View the full presentation here. I’m grateful to have met
The Consequences of Social Media Influence Measurement
October 26, 2011 – 1:06 pm
Leadership in online influence scoring is becoming embattled territory as services in this area include Klout, Kred, Tweet Grader (by Hubspot), and Tweet Level. But one should note, all are driven by black box algorithms that vye for the title of industry “gold standard” for anointing online influencers. This isn’t pure vanity either; knowing the level
Twitter and the Ontario 2011 Election
September 29, 2011 – 9:51 am
Green Energy and Health Care join Jobs as Twitterverse Campaign Themes A shorter version of this blog post can be found on the Toronto Board of Trade website (link) In one of the more important turns of the campaign David Suzuki endorsed Dalton McGuinty and the OLP. Green Energy is a top issue associated significantly
Social Media Monitoring Tools: Their limitations
July 4, 2011 – 10:24 am
They say, not everything is for everybody and it applies more than ever to social media analytics (SMA). We admit the state of the industry has a long way to go to serve what are real and pressing needs in the market. Jason Falls led the way by criticizing the industry’s bias toward monitoring versus
Nexalogy @ Defence Research Social Media “Big Data” Analysis Workshop
June 21, 2011 – 3:36 pm
Last week I passed a personal milestone and gave my first “Keynote Address” at the Defence Research and Development Canada Social Media “Big Data” Analysis Workshop on Friday June 17 in Ottawa. The other keynote address was given by John Kelly from Morningside Analytics, whose approach highlights the importance of segmentation in the blogosphere when
Physics, society and social media marketing
May 31, 2011 – 9:02 am
I never thought I would actually say that I missed reading scientific papers. It was one of my least favorite tasks as an astrophysicist, right after grant writing, and paper editing. But since the social media data revolution I can’t help but gleam at the luscious titles flying by in my RSS feed from the Physics and
Strata on Twitter
February 10, 2011 – 9:42 am
I spent part of last week in California at O’Reilly’s Strata Conference. Strata’s tagline is, “making data work” and it’s all about big data and what to do with it. One of the sources of “big data” is the never-ending stream of material emanating from the social web. People are taking many approaches to analyzing
Measurement Matters
September 30, 2010 – 8:32 pm
This past Tuesday kicked off the 5th season of Toronto’s Third Tuesday events with a day-long conference called Measurement Matters. Host Joe Thornley put together a fantastic lineup including a panel chaired by Terry Fallis in the early afternoon called, “Analysis – more than skin deep – how to find real meaning”. On the panel
Mashable’s accurate crystal ball
August 20, 2010 – 5:06 pm
Today at Mashable, Jim Toobin (who is the president of Ignite Social Media) wrote a fantastic post about the future of our field: Why Social Media Monitoring Tools Are About to Get Smarter. He mentions both cluster analysis and semantic analysis as avenues for future development and accurately describes some of the challenges that go
