dataworks | data musings at betaworks

Scale Model, one of the newest companies to launch out of betaworks, helps identify, follow and reach communities on Twitter. While there’s a great visual dashboard that gives us a way to look at what’s bubbling up from within communities, it is still...

This is a project developed by Chris Hidey, who spent this summer interning with us at the betaworks data science team, focusing on natural language understanding and event detection in news streams.
In Chris’ words:
The project I worked on this summer was to develop a method that algorithmically generates timelines around a given news subject. A “subject” can be any topic or event, such as the Sony hacks or the FIFA corruption scandal or the ongoing news coverage...

A few days ago I published an in depth analysis of Apple’s iTunes top free chart algorithm, boosting, rank manipulation and algorithmic glitching – on medium.com.
Here’s the overview:
On October 29th and December 18th, 2014, something very strange happened to the iTunes top apps chart. Like an earthquake shaking up the region, all app positions in the chart were massively rearranged, some booted off completely. These two extremely...

Earlier this year, Facebook announced the launch of trending topics on its newsfeed page. Like Twitter trends, which reflect the attention landscape in the Twittersphere, Facebook trends showcase the most popular news stories within the Facebook world...