case study: web2x digest picked up news event early
June 19th, 2009 by ajI notice a perfect case study from today’s news: “Continental airlines incident” was emerging at about 8:29am (PST) on the twitter daily new topic list on this http://web2express.org website. it was probably at the same time as other major news outlets broke the news, maybe even a litter bit earlier. Surprisingly, this top news did not show up on Twitter.com’s trending topics list, nor on google trends at all for the whole day.
This case study shows the difference between various trending applications. I think the underlying technology is the key. Calais is the semantic analysis core of my real time trending system. It seems Calais does pretty good job as it promises.
more digging:
I just found the flight schedule from NYT.com report: The flight, Flight 61, took off at 9:54 a.m. in
Something is amazing if you compare the time carefully. The incident showed up as new hot twitter topics at 8:29am PST while the flight was still in the air. where did the tweets come from so early? did someone tweet in the airplane? or people on the ground in Europe got the information early and tweet? Anyway, news travels on twitter fast, very fast!