Last week I attended the TechCrunch ChristmasCrunch which came with the tagline “It’s a realtime holiday”. It’s great to see so many companies embracing the real-time web and building their businesses around it. Some companies that you would still class as start-ups such as TweetDeck, Seesmic and tweetmeme are now relatively established and there were a dozen or more startup pitches with the majority of these new companies focusing on the real-time web.
There’s so much data being generated by social networks that it wasn’t surprising that a lot of the focus was around analysing the data. The key words from the event in relation to the data were relevance, sentiment, curation, authority and location. All of these terms play off each other. Relevance can be determined by authority and location. Sentiment, relevance and authority can be determined by a curation process. Some solutions to curation pitched at the event were based on language and text analysis, whilst others suggested crowdsourcing and using manual intervention as a means of determining the quality of data.
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