You Have My Attention

Sometimes, they just write themselves:

"Print newspapers are declaring bankruptcy nationwide. High-profile blogs are proliferating. Media companies are exploring new production techniques and business models in a landscape that is increasingly dominated by the Internet. In the midst of this upheaval, it is difficult to know what is actually happening to the shape of our news. Beyond one-off anecdotes or painstaking manual content analysis, there are few ways to examine the emerging news ecosystem."

The above quote comes courtesy of Media Cloud, a new system that will allow a single user to sift through the vast seas of information being generated online around the world, and (hopefully) distill meaning from it all. The tools offered will allow you to see what topics are popping up the most in blog, t, who is talking about them and where the chatter is coming from. This is maybe the first big step towards the effective data mining of the new internet that I alluded to earlier.



While this system is still in the very early stages of its development, they do have a small trial worth taking a look at. It is going to be interesting to see how this story/device evolves over the coming year.

Look Down The Nose

I think most people would admit that we don't really know what to do with social networking, just yet. I mean, people have figured out how to use the devices personally, but using the business models behind them and their advertising potential is still in the learning stage. One ex-hacker seems recently suggested some fun ideas to stir up the conversation.

His name is Virgil Griffith, and he's a PhD student at Caltech. Griffith is really into data-mining on a a massive scale. He's devised a project where he compares the books listed as 'Favourites' on a user's Facebook page with the average SAT entrance score to the University they are currently attending (so, obviously, this is limited to the US). Based on which books score the most hits in schools with lower/higher standards he has created a graph entitled, Books That Make You Dumb.

Not a great endorsement for Alice Walker's The Color Purple or S.E. Hinton's The Oustiders. They are both pretty standard reading for middle school/early high school English classrooms, but I suppose if you're tastes stopped developing then...... well, its hard to prescribe much value to the graph. There are the issues of correlation does not mean causation and the fact that book taste may not indicate intelligence per se. But, of course, that is not the point. It is meant to be a conversation starter. This is Griffith's way of getting people to think about the different ways researchers/marketers/whoever can use the massive amounts of data being created by social networking users.

So what do you think? With Amazon releasing a terabyte of public data this week, where is data mining headed? And what are we going to be learning about ourselves?

Collecting the Reins

So what is 'hype'? When a band has it, every blog that covers music seems to be talking about them. When a band doesn't, well, they receive only cursory lip service. At times, the concept of 'hype' has felt completely binary. On or off. 1 or 0. Hype or no hype. Pitchfork would tell their readers what was cool. Metacritic would tell their readers what the critics thought was cool. And the blogs would froth and bark their own opinions. It has been a gloriously functional mess for at least the last five years.

But for a band trying to make decisions about their future (read: do I quit teaching kindergarten in order to tour, or similar), hype was frustratingly hard to quantify. 'Do we even have fans in Raleigh? Will anyone come out to the show?' It is this doubt that Band Metrics aims to remove.

Read Write & Web's recent piece on the new application caught my attention with the sheer simplicity of the idea. For some bands, their entire existence amounts to a MySpace or Last.fm page. They can see the download counter going up, up, up, on their mp3's, but have no way of knowing just who is doing the downloading. Or what those people are saying about them on the blog/message boards. Or where those people live, what else they like, etc. It is analytics for the grassroots music business. And its a very cool idea.













The questions that remain, however: How many bands will be comfortable enough with the practicality of the service to buy in? Once the information is collected, how are bands going to leverage that information? How does one mobilize a following that exists purely on the web?