Major League Baseball is using new data tools to create more detailed profiles of people who visit team and league websites. MLB plans to use the extra data to create profiles of affluent customers, and to let brands target those profiles on private ad exchanges. Read more »
Upworthy is attracting attention for its headlines and its viral videos about gay marriage, women’s rights and other social causes. But the site’s real value may be its potential to help the Democrats maintain their lead in social media and big data. Read more »
Gravity, a startup that personalizes reader content for web publishers, is opening up its recommendation engine to anyone that wants to use it. Considering the increasing importance of personalization online, this could be a good deal. Read more »
A group of British researchers recently analyzed 2.5 million newspaper articles in order to prove that new data analysis techniques, such as machine learning and natural-language processing, can accurately classify media content. They hope their approach can save academicians untold hours of manual labor. Read more »
In the fight about royalties from streaming media services like Pandora, Popular cellist Zoë Keating says she’s willing to give up the money in exchange for data. It’s an idea that’s gaining traction elsewhere, too, as more companies are paying consumers for their truly valuable data. Read more »
A new study shows that the BBC and the New York Times have the most reach and influence on Twitter among news organizations. The findings are just a taste of what we can expect as researchers apply data-based network analysis to patterns of news consumption. Read more »
Carter S. won his first-ever Kaggle competition — our own GigaOM WordPress Challenge — using a brute force method of data science he calls overkill analytics. Rather than spend untold hours perfecting complex models, Carter used simple algorithms and let powerful microprocessors do the rest. Read more »
Satyamev Jayate, one of India’s highest-rated television shows, is using data as a means to effect meaningful change. The show’s producers are aggregating and analyzing the millions of messages they receive on controversial issues to do everything from planning future episodes to pushing for political change. Read more »
Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other e-reader companies are collecting data about your e-book reading habits, but they’re keeping their most interesting findings close to the vest. Read more »
In publishing, there’s a constant struggle to determine who’ll read what posts, what the ideal headline might is and when is the best time to publish. GigaOM is teaming with Splunk to find some answers via a Kaggle competition worth a total of $25,000 in prizes. Read more »
According to new research by Twitter’s data science team, Twitter search is used often as a tool for finding breaking news in real time, which makes it difficult for Twitter to assign relevance to any given tweet or topic in the long run. Read more »
Big data is an intimidating concept for publishers who don’t collect much info about their customers already. A first step is to think about “data-driven decision making,” and little data, says bitly’s Hilary Mason. Read more »
To address the fragmentation exploding across the digital advertising market, Luma Partners founder and CEO Terence Kawaja floated the possibility of an operating system for digital ad companies to use as a common building block for their products, just how mobile apps use iOS and Android. Read more at GigaOM »
