I hear this question quite often: how is the housing market doing? Let’s try to answer that.
First, define what precise information you want to know: whether the cost of buying (or renting) a property is going up, or down, and by how much, in a particular area (say Brighton). (more…)
When compared to certain parts of the internet, spam is a beautiful, poetic and inventive thing. It really really is.
In some (lots of) parts of the net there is a tipping point where spam has more going for it than human utterances. Spam is more open to new ideas, more thoughtful, less repetitive, less myopic than lots and lots of forums and blog sites, online culture magazines, etc. And it’s getting more complex and more inventive, while some blogs and forums are beginning to feed off themselves and on themselves.
Using machines to understand text is a big part of what we do here at Brandwatch. And sentiment analysis is part of it. As wikipedia nicely puts it;
“Generally speaking, [sentiment analysis] aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic”. (more…)
Seth Godin wrote a moving post yesterday about worthiness. He writes almost as a stream of consciousness and makes some great points. I like the last one best
“The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.”
Which leads to the question how good is good enough. How quickly should you release. In particular, this applies nicely to software. How many bugs are acceptable before making a release? Or what level of bug is acceptable to let through? (more…)
As I mentioned in the last post, the accuracy of the entire result set is critical to us at Brandwatch, but so too is making sure that we have as big a sample as possible.
We are increasing our crawl all the time (circa 100k new sites per month right now), but a comparison with Google’s index is something that we do on a regular basis to cross check our total result count with theirs.
Whilst doing this I stumbled upon a rather surprising little secret (more…)
This is a classic tug-of-war issue with search. There is a good definition on Wikipedia and I really like Tim Bray’s description on the Ongoing site.
Recall is important. Google likes to boast about its recall capacity by saying that you are looking at results 1-10 of x million where x is usually unfeasibly large (more on this rather bogus figure in later posts). Aside from recall what is important to Google is the relevance of the top results (this is the precision bit). Page Rank which forms a big part of the answer to how far up Google your results appear is their secret sauce, although Larry and Sergey’s original thesis is public knowledge. (more…)
Sifting through the list of web pages in Brandwatch that have been reported as spam, you get a feel for the ever-changing ways that spam merchants manage to infect the web with junk.
They used to just redirect browsers to their own hosted spam sites - but we could blacklist the entire site and filter out all the pages. Next, legitimate sites were hacked and hijacked to store the spam content, exploiting weaknesses in certain webservers. Many of these we filter out using tell-tale patterns in the hijacked page address. The latest trend seems to be hijacking a range of sites, embedding the spam content from one server inside pages served by another. (more…)
So I decided to compare data between the iphone and Nokia 95, two phones which I suspected shared common air in the blogosphere. The N95,…ah!
Something that Brandwatch brings to light is the hold a particular brand name has over a brand tracking system. There were 2284 mentions for ‘iphone’ last week, and 180 for ‘Nokia 95′. Really? So few for the new Nokia? To what extent are these volume results manipulated by the brand tracking friendliness of these respective brand names? (more…)
Remember the promises of flawless matching of supply and demand and limitless consumer power when the web burst onto the scene a dozen years ago?
The last couple of years have not disappointed (Consumers are already enjoying near full transparency of prices and in categories like travel and music, and of opinions as well.). 2008 could be the year when this kind of transparency really starts scaring non-performing brands, forcing them to shift focus from exerting their pricey influence via parts of the media to taking more stock of priceless consumer opinions. (more…)
If you could put ‘Brandness’ itself under the microscope, this is what you would see: a crossroads with a pussy playing a banjo, hovering just off the ground.
There would be a signpost which says ‘Capitalism That Way’ and ‘Faith That way’. The signpost would be spinning round, too fast to read though.
It’s probably fair to say that, though we can all name a brand or fifty, we cannot point at one, pin point where it happens, where it has taken place, or what it is made out of. We may be trying with brand analysis tools to understand better and better how to pick up signs of how a brand works on the web – how the internet makes and breaks a brand - but you ain’t gonna pick up the brand itself: it’s not made of any material.
The product is different: we know where and what the product is, the Lexus and the Stella Artois that surfs on the reputation of the brand – we can point at and hold and drink it, and we can count the number of times it is mentioned, and who is talking about it. But to track the brand itself? Trickier. (more…)
