Monthly Archives: November 2013
Confessions of a Prolific Moonlighter (with a Chronic Writing Disorder)
Posted on November 23, 2013 Leave a Comment
A ~5 minute Ignite talk (20 slides, 15 seconds per slide) that provides some advice on writing tech books — and life. The fundamental takeaway is that a book is a startup! (If you want it to be…) It’s a product (and/or services.) But it’s especially product Tech writing is a skill It’s story-telling Moonlighting […]
What Do Tim O’Reilly, Lady Gaga, and Marissa Mayer All Have In Common?
Posted on November 22, 2013 4 Comments
This post examines the followers of some popular Twitter users as the final installment of a multi-part series about exploring Twitter influence by asking the (Freakonomics-inspired) question, What do Tim O’Reilly, Lady Gaga, and Marissa Mayer all have in common? Although it may initially seem like an obnoxious question to ask, some of the answers may intrigue you […]
Super Simple Storage for Social Web Data with MongoDB (Computing Twitter Influence, Part 4)
Posted on November 20, 2013 3 Comments
In the last few posts for this series on computing twitter influence, we’ve reviewed some of the considerations in calculating a base metric for influence and how to acquire the necessary data to begin analysis. This post finishes up all of the prerequisite machinery before the real data science fun begins by introducing MongoDB as a […]
How to Deliver a Successful Tech Workshop with Vagrant and AWS
Posted on November 15, 2013 1 Comment
At Strata, I delivered workshop called Mining the Social Web with IPython Notebook, and in order to ensure that the workshop would meet its objectives and be a smashing success, I knew that a few constraints had to be considered: Everyone must be able to follow along with the examples. (The goal of the workshop is […]
An Approximate Solution for TL;DR [~50 Year Old Text Summarization Hack Presented as a ~1.7MB Animated GIF]
Posted on November 13, 2013 1 Comment
Suffering from information overload? Too much TL;DR happening in your life? Attention span just isn’t what it used to be? Watch this short ~30 second screencast (a ~1.7MB animated GIF) that demonstrates a 50+ year old hack for summarizing news articles and other types of online content. After all, it seemed fitting that the presentation of a […]
Getting Started with Twitter’s API: From Zero to Firehose in ~2.5 Minutes
Posted on November 12, 2013 4 Comments
Mining the Social Web‘s goal is to teach you how to transform curiosity into insight, and its virtual machine features two IPython Notebooks that are designed to get you up and running with Twitter’s API as quickly as possible. The following ~2.5 minute screencast shows how to generate OAuth credentials, establish a Twitter API connection, and make API […]
Twitter Could Be So Much Better Than An Advertising Company
Posted on November 11, 2013 2 Comments
If you’re a business with enough users, you can probably make some money by placing advertisements. Advertising drives commerce, and commerce is fundamental to a healthy economy. It’s a great and wonderful thing that profits are earned, jobs are created, taxes are paid, and a virtuous cycle develops around the commerce that results from advertising. […]
Mining the Social Web 