Getting the news before the news
Firstly, and importantly, I hope there were no serious injuries in today's earthquake in California. Earthquakes are very scary. I know. I was in Evans Hall at UC Berkeley in 1989 when "the big one" hit. My thoughts go out to anyone who has suffered in this.
The above picture was take from Express.co.uk but the picture looks strikingly like a DataMinr picture.
Passed the link to my friends. I got the news "late" and by "checking in" to my FB account. Two friends said, yeah, was on the newswires at 3AM (or 4AM and change) PST. My reaction was, well, Twitter, FB and other social media got the news first. Why? because everyone who is a member of some social media venue is a "reporter", whereas the number of reporters for the newswires is a tiny fraction of that. In that respect, I agree with the DataMinr proposition- possible to deliver important news events *faster* than the news.
Now, I consume social media feeds 24/7 for sentiments on stocks, politicians and certain, shall we say imminent, referendums, but this is another important aspect of consuming realtime data that isn't exactly sentiment but is in fact news being delivered faster than the news.
The application, beyond the obvious selfish reasons of seeking financial gain on certain types of events, are more altruistic and humanistic- if there is an event that could lead to danger/risk of carnage/death, it would be important to receive news of that event at the lowest latency possible.
Executive Coaching for Investment Professionals, Career Coach, Leadership Coach, Consultant.
8 年Whilst for this type of factual news social media can definitely produce a time advantage, I read an interesting article on how the trend to people getting most of their news via social media is skewing our perceptions of the world as we tend to only get the views of "people like us" ie our friends and contacts and are seeing less of the arguments that might challenge our views.
CEO
8 年Here's an interesting paper on geotagging without the geotags. https://cs.stanford.edu/~jurgens/docs/compton-jurgens-allen_bigdata-2014.pdf
CEO
8 年by the way, if any of you have suggestions for monitoring these kinds of things with certain keywords/phrases, let me know. I'll set it up and give you the simple subscription code.