“Data on the volume of online searches can be used as indicators of economic activity. This article examines the use of these data for labour and housing markets in the United Kingdom. These data provide some additional information relative to existing surveys. And with further development, internet search data could become an important tool for economic analysis.”
Gigaom interpretation of Schmidt on social data: “We will continue scraping whether Facebook likes it or not.”
Is Google’s new tool — “Google Correlate” a magic bullet for anticipating moves in the market?
For the uninitiated, “Google Correlate is an experimental new tool on Google Labs which enables you to find queries with a similar pattern to a target data series. The target can either be a real-world trend that you provide (e.g., a data set of event counts over time) or a query that you enter.” more here.
Since we are currently providing social data to hedge fund managers, we immediately wanted to test the waters of Google Correlate to see what might be possible. Here’s what we’ve seen from a (very) quick initial pass.
Here’s an experiment any investor can try: What search terms correlate to moves in the price of gold?
Step one: Download historical data from for a gold fund. We used the CBOE Gold Index. Data for the relevant period available here.
Step two: Reformat CSV file so dates are in column one, closing prices in column two.
Step three: Upload to Google Correlate and await for aligned terms to appear. Partial results below. Correlation coefficient in black, term in blue. No striking terms in the result. Sadly, the magic “buy gold” type of phrase is not immediately apparent.
Hmmm, people selling Gold to buy NY real estate??
My initial impression is that being forced to (1) Always go back to Jan 2003 for all analyses results, (2) Include non-english terms (3) See only very highly correlated terms, results in a lot of noise.
In this instance, I did discover a few terms that may show some promise. One term, “taza” (.8859 correlation) may refer to a prominent real estate business management system. Seeking Alpha has written before about the “amazing” correlation of gold and real estate here. I will be digging deeper into this line and will report back.
Bottom line? I suspect with more controls, and knobs made available to dial this could be a very useful tool for fund managers, but at this time it is tantalizing, but sadly crippled. Insights come only from a highly manual process. What I wonder is — who has these capabilities available to them now? It’s a fair guess is that there is a far more evolved implementation available internally. Hmmm.
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Google just launched a new Google Labs product called Google Correlate, which looks at search trends, and attempts to apply them to real-world situations.
Pete Warden on why linked data sets mean that the anonymization process “is an illusion.”
Socrata has introduced a new data.gov Web site designed to help government agencies publish and distribute data in new ways, including interactive charts, maps and lists.
The government collects all kinds of data about citizens, geography, salaries, and everything else imaginable. This site could end up as a real trove of information.
As we launch this blog in 2011 the concept of “social data” is still relatively new to many marketers and industry professionals. Sure, customer data has been collected for ages, in all kinds of forms — through direct response advertising, surveys, market research, and even just general observation.
But social data in online technology is a new kind of customer data: it is the collective information produced by millions of people as they actively participate in online social activities.
This new area of market knowledge is different from the classics in a few key ways:
1. It is voluntarily public
2. It represents a natural state of affairs
3. It is relatively easy to access [click to continue…]
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Below is a round up of todays relevant Tweets from our Twitter list of Social Data Gurus and sorted by number of retweets — as detected by the Topsy API.
Debating the Future of MR | LinkedIn – (294 Tweets)
3 Reasons that We are Moving Away from Facebook as a Platform – Zuupy Official Blog – (285)
Bing Debuts Social Search with New Facebook Integration – (260)
A Tour of Facebook’s Upcoming Ad Platform – TNW Social Media – (227)
White House: International Strategy For Cyberspace – (165)
Twitter Sparkline Generator! – (155)
Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity – (103)
8 things every marketing technologist should know – Chief Marketing Technologist – (101)
Ben Fry on visualization future and data literacy – (97)
Directory of Social Media Monitoring and Analysis Tools – (88)
Why Predictive Analytics is Not Enough | DataInfoCom – (67)
Number Picture – Crowd-Sourcing New Ways For People To Visualize Data – (37)
7th Annual Text Analytics Summit – (32)
Government Developing Data Mining Tools To Fight Terrorism — InformationWeek – (32)
Three technologies that will change the logistics game – (27)
Put strategy and creative ahead of marketing technology – Chief Marketing Technologist – (27)
Slides from eric14 talks @ #IbmBigData – (14)
The Future of Market Research Debate: Getting From Here To There | GreenBook – (12)
Big Data and its Implications – Bloomberg – (9)
O’Reilly Strata Online Conference – (8)
Joy of six: Gapminder, Tableau style – (5)
The #measure Consulting Landscape | IQ Workforce Blog – (5)
What is “Fell in Love with Data” All About? – (4)
Revolutions: Reflections on Data Science Summit 2011 – (4)
Researcher Affinity Browser – (3)
Eyeo Data Visualization – a set on Flickr – (3)
LDMTA2011: Large-scale Data Mining: Theory and Applications (LDMTA 2011) – (2)
Graphing Connections Between Recent Twitterers (Protovis Demo) – (1)
ODNI: We did no data mining in 2010 – (0)
Next Gen Market Research (NGMR) – The Best MR Networking Group… LinkedIn – (0)
Kleiner Perkins Leads $9M Round In Apache Hadoop-Based Analytics Platform Datameer – (0)
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Twitter has announced a new type of deal with NTT DOCOMO, Japan’s largest carrier: a content deal.
Microsoft’s search engine is about to tie its search results to the Facebook social graph in a move that will come as a blow to Google and its +1 initiative.
eyeo brings together the most creative coders, designers and artists working today, and shaping tomorrow – expect an amazing three days of talks, labs, demos & events fueled by the people and tools that are transforming digital culture.
converge to inspire.
It certainly seems like they did.
Facebook is rapidly extending its tendrils into the web at large. Their universal login feature is more popular (and frankly, easier from a user perspective) than OpenID ever will be, and Facebook’s “like” or “share” buttons dot blog posts and web pages like this one.
From a social data standpoint, this is an incredible trove of information: Facebook is tracking what web pages are liked, and worth sharing, by over five hundred million people worldwide. No wonder Google is nervous — can you imagine the kind of search engine Facebook can build with that kind of metadata on the internet at large?
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Today’s Wall Street Journal mentions the Senate hearing with Apple and Google, called because of the recent attention drawn to both companies over their practice of collecting locational data from their iPhone and Android devices.
It’s good that high profile cases like this are helping to educate consumers about what kinds of data can be collected about them and their activities from devices and web browsers, even in ways they may not expect. But it’s important to remember that there’s a difference between data collection (the WSJ calls it “spying”) in the background, and what happens in modern social networks like Facebook, Quora, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
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