All posts from Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Briefly, MSN is now surfacing hyperlocal blog content (originally found in the Local Lens application on Bing Maps) in the Local Edition area of the site. Currently this is only available in the ten cities that Local Lens covers, but that will change...

Today we pushed out a modest update to our hyperlocal application Local Lens. Users won't see a huge difference, but behind the scenes we have improved our text mining systems which recognize and map entity names (e.g. restaurants, museums, coffee shops) and addresses. In addition, some other changes will have improved coverage in a few areas (such as Capitol Hill in Seattle).
Below, in a post from SF Appeal's The Alley, we pull out one of the more complex address expressions.

With the tight integration between Bing map apps and the full mapping platform, clicking on the address expression brings the user directly to the location mentioned, providing us with intimate context.
  
For a look at the future of mapping, take a look at Blaise' latest TED talk on the Bing Maps ecosystem. 

By now, everyone is pretty much on the same page with apps on mobile devices. The popularity of these programs, which range from simple widgets to full applications, is not surprising given a) the model has been in existence for years (i.e. 'applications' running on PCs) and b) the simplicity of putting together a website or service which backs what is, in many cases, a simple rendering of the data.
However, something really special happens with these apps live not in the flat world of the operating system as most do, but in ecosystems. In this case, by ecosystem, I mean an environment in which applications can interact with each other in a seamless manner, one in which the user experience is at the fore. My favourite example of this right now is the adhoc-spontaneous-movie experience in the bing ecosystem on the iphone.
You start off at the bing home:
 
hitting the 'movie' button brings up a listing of which movies are on near you in time and space.
 
Selecting a movie I can read synopses and information about possible locations.

Selecting a location provides me with an option to get directions
 
And then, there I am, watching the utterly disappointing Wolfman.

Take a moment to check out this video which shows some of the content that Blaise presented at TED today. There are two key features: integration and matching of photographs to our human scale imagery, and the integration of the world wide telescope. These features are pretty cool, but ultimately it is the whole idea of the mapping ecosystem that is the real winner.

The Street Shots app, which matches images to our human scale experience has a couple of really nice emergent qualities. The human scale imagery, in some sense, is more useful the more objective it is - matching images can really bring a place alive by capturing a human moment or event.

Secondly, when someone has uploaded an historical image, once can experience a location with a view to a different age. Here is a picture of Vancouver from 1890.
 Bing maps - the ecology - is only just getting going!  

Driving back from the slopes on Saturday we got caught in a jam due to an accident on the 520 bridge over Lake Washington. Looking at the traffic we can see that while the crash was on the westbound lane (the top of the map), the impact on the flow of traffic on the eastbound lane due to rubbernecking was equally severe. For the record, we couldn’t find any tweets during our 30 mins in slow traffic detailing what had happened, but traditional sources and access to web cams did help.

The New York Times has an interesting visualization of the budget proposal. While this gets off to a good start, it doesn’t really deliver due to the lack of true zooming. When you zoom into a portion of the image, the labels detailing the new context are missing.

(Briefly) I've been working with some new data that our team has produced and created the view below. What I find striking about this visualization of 6k blogs is the clear division between two major clusters. A very limited drill down on the data suggests that all of these blogs are Malaysian in origin (and most are on Google's Blogspot). I don't yet have enough insight into this component to understand why there is a split - perhaps more to follow.

I just noticed that Google Map's aerial images of Whistler (hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics) is now nice and white. This is definite a change (and other ski locations I visited have not been updated with winter data).

New to me is this work by Bergstrom and Rosvall on discoverying and visualizing changes over time in networks. The basic idea is to track nodes as the join and migrate between clusters in a network.

Some additional visualization are available here. 

As I tweeted today, I noticed something wrong with the Google landing page I was getting: the advanced search link mistakenly links back to www.google.com, not the advanced search page. Thinking it through, I thought this might be due to flighting a new UI.
This UI is similar to that which Tom Krazil spotted back in November, but different in colouring. Going via an anonymous proxy, I get the normal fit and finish.
Update: note also that the web options (the left rail facets) are now their by default, whereas in the standard UI, they are collapsed and require expansion by the user.
In addition, the actual landing page has a different design for its buttons and the shadow on the main Google logo has all but gone.

I just noticed that the West Seattle Blog- a well established hyperlocal blog in Seattle - has either rolled out, or is testing a new mobile theme.
 
At the bottom of the page is a button to switch the mobile setting off, but it doesn't appear to have any effect, so I suspect this what we are seeing is the testing of a new mobile site for the blog and that they are experiencing a few glitches. Strangely, when I visit this from my iPhone, I get the non-mobile version of the site.
See my related post on 2010 - The Year of the Neighborhood.

As the geosocial revolution continues - creating more and more intimate links between the digital space and our physical spaces via mobile devices and data driven services - the word 'neighborhood' is becoming more and more prominent. A neighborhood (in urban terms, larger than a block, smaller than a zipcode) is the perfect granularity to connect with users as we spend a good chunk of our time there.
'Near by' is often scoped by neighborhood, our schools define catchment areas at this level, supermarkets serve neighborhood sized portions of the population.
As we see the rise of geosocial gaming (things like Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown), and the mechanisms they introduce being adopted by other spatially aware services (Yelp) we are also seeing the rise of the importance of real estate data. It is in no way surprising that Google is interested in the real estate market.
NabeWise, a new neighborhood review site, similar in some regards to both EveryBlock and Centerd. It's just opened its doors with coverage for New York and San Francisco, and its entry points are qualities of neighborhoods (trendy, singles, beautiful people, etc.). It is very interesting to note that the sign up process includes the question 'are you a real estate agent?'
Design-wise, many of these sites have to address the presentation of rich data in an understandable and consumable manner. In this regard, these resident oriented sites have similarities with real estats 2.0 sites (RedFin, Zillow, Trulia) and take advantage of the increased data literacy of a younger, web 2.0 savvy audience.
Key in all of this is the bedrock data set of neighborhoods. As the LA times demonstrated with their Mapping LA project, the definition of any neighborhood is somewhat subjective and borders need to be negotiated. For many cities, Wikipedia keeps rich pages describing neighborhoods and their histories.
From a UX point of view, we can expect to see more interfaces with elements like these, sampled from some of the companies above (NabeWise, Trulia, EveryBlock):