Summize Blog

What's Happening on Twitter

We just did a joint post with R*W*W* on what people talk about on twitter.  We found three types of conversations.  Status updates of every day activities like "getting coffee" or "check out this post on X" etc.  Second, short term memes where many people talk about some event before, during or after it. These conversations are usually short lived, from a few minutes to hours. For example a TV show like "Lost" will have some buzz, before during and after the show airs but drop out of the stream very quickly.  Third are long term memes of interest that people talk about for days. Politics or new games are great examples of these longer term thoughts being expressed. Check out the full post.

"What People Say When They Tweet"

Science 2.0?

This year I am running several conferences and it has caused me to ask this question: can science move faster? Today most scientists have far more compute power (peta-flops) than they did a few years ago and yet the many scientific processes are no faster than before. For example last year (2007) I had my very first 2009 publication. Thats right in 2009 a year from now a journal paper that was written in 2006 will come out, so is science really keeping up with other related progresses?

Advanced Twitter Search

Once you know the basics of Summize's twitter search, you might want to try Advanced Search, which offers numerous options for making your searches more accurate and useful.   You can do a lot more with Summize Twitter search than just typing in search terms. With Advanced Search, you can search only for pages with variations of a term, to and from various people and many other variations.

Twitter Search

We have been tracking ways people express their opinions and ideas on the web. One of the coolest ways people are sharing information now is Twitter. There are already a few ways for others to see this data now like Twitter's public timeline. If you want to search it there is already TweetScan that is pretty cool and you should check it out, but not being able to understand the message thread was a problem for us. There is Quotably for that, but search is still needed to find things and bouncing back and forth was a pain. Lastly, all the different languages out there makes it hard to find some things.

Update to EC2 Services

A few months ago I posted some cost analysis on startups using EC2 services from Amazon. Just recently they announced some updates to that service addressing two issues we did not examine.

1. Availability Zones
2. Elastic IP Addresses

Here are a couple of quick blurbs on the new capabilities.

Summize Text Summarization Talk @ UMD

Today, Eric gave a talk on our summarization technology at the University of Maryland's cloud computing speaker series.
 

InfoScale 2008

Conferences are a great way to keep in sync with the latest ideas.  This year I am co-chairing several conferences in the area of search.  Today I thought it would be interesting to share our InfoScale 2008 call for papers.  InfoScale is a conferences started a few years ago focusing on the issues of scaling networking and search problems. So, check out the call for papers and the venue of the conference.