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Jon Kleinberg's word bursts

Written by Martin Belam
Published 19 February, 2003
Categories: Search

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This article in the New Scientist about Jon Kleinberg's work - Word 'bursts' may reveal online trends - makes it sound like it is just the same thing that the BBCi homepage, Aaron Schatz's Lycos 50 and Google Zeitgeist are doing already with search terms.

And very similar to David Sifry's work at Technorati, where what you could call 'link bursts' within blogs are generating great stuff at his 100 most interesting recent blogs and 100 interesting newcomers lists.

But if Kleinburg has come up with an effective way to apply this technique to large sets of documents it could be very useful & interesting indeed. I'd want to see some rather more substantial examples of it in action than the ones given by New Scientist though:

'Kleinberg analysed all the annual state of the union addresses given by US Presidents since 1790...from 1930 to 1937 a spike in the use of the word "depression" is seen'

Not a real shock finding I guess.

It seems to me from a distance, however, that the technique may be much better suited to smaller sets of documents or to searching over intranet sets, where there is a common theme and a semi-controlled vocabulary, rather than applying it to the web as a whole.

Posted by Martin Belam, February 19, 2003
Read more posts on currybetdotnet about: Search

The views expressed on currybetdotnet are my own, and do not reflect the views of my current or former employers.

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About Martin Belam

I'm a London-based internet consultant and writer, with 8 years experience in product management, information architecture, and user experience design for global brands like Sony, Vodafone, The Guardian and the BBC. I specialise in advising on search, widgets, RSS, online news publishing and bulk email delivery.
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