Mining the Social Web: Analyzing Data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Other Social Media Sites Review

Mining the Social Web: Analyzing Data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Other Social Media Sites
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Mining the Social Web does a great job of introducing a wide variety of techniques and wealth of resources for exploring freely available social data and personal information. If you are willing to spend the time tinkering with the examples, the book is pure fun. It offers a nice compliment to Segaran's Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications. The two books overlap but where they do offer different perspectives and explanations of common techniques (e.g., TF-IDF, cosine similarity, Jaccard index). If you are well-versed in data mining the web you may find much of the discussion familiar. If you have only been casually engaged to date, your toolbox will fill quickly.
In order to work with the book's examples related to LinkedIn and Facebook you really need to have a robust collection of connections. In terms of the source code itself, most of it worked as is. I wasn't able to install the Buzz library which limited my interaction with material in chapter 7 and opted to not get involved with the LinkedIn or Facebook but found the discussions around them easy to follow. By far my favorite chapter in the book was chapter 8, "Blogs et al.: Natural Language Processing (and Beyond)..." It was quite fascinating and caused my reading list to grow considerably.

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Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn generate a tremendous amount of valuable social data, but how can you find out who's making connections with social media, what they're talking about, or where they're located? This concise and practical book shows you how to answer these questions and more. You'll learn how to combine social web data, analysis techniques, and visualization to help you find what you've been looking for in the social haystack, as well as useful information you didn't know existed.

Each standalone chapter introduces techniques for mining data in different areas of the social Web, including blogs and email. All you need to get started is a programming background and a willingness to learn basic Python tools.

Get a straightforward synopsis of the social web landscape
Use adaptable scripts on GitHub to harvest data from social network APIs such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn
Learn how to employ easy-to-use Python tools to slice and dice the data you collect
Explore social connections in microformats with the XHTML Friends Network
Apply advanced mining techniques such as TF-IDF, cosine similarity, collocation analysis, document summarization, and clique detection
Build interactive visualizations with web technologies based upon HTML5 and JavaScript toolkits

"Let Matthew Russell serve as your guide to working with social data sets old (email, blogs) and new (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook). Mining the Social Web is a natural successor to Programming Collective Intelligence: a practical, hands-on approach to hacking on data from the social Web with Python." --Jeff Hammerbacher, Chief Scientist, Cloudera

"A rich, compact, useful, practical introduction to a galaxy of tools, techniques, and theories for exploring structured and unstructured data." --Alex Martelli, Senior Staff Engineer, Google


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