Hack day project idea(s), inspired by the data science session this morning. Look at a random sample of comments across WordPress.com and…

  • Classify their content (e.g. how they’re responding to the post).
  • Do a topical classification of post content and compare against comment word count or frequency.
  • Calculate diversity of commenters for a site as a function of unique email addresses to number of comments.
  • Build a network graph indicating correlation between commenters across different sites.

The big takeaway: with any given dataset, play with visualizations first before trying to draw a conclusion.

Travel this month: VIP meetup in Las Vegas starting today, New Zealand for Webstock at the end of next week, and then a combo Utah for skiing and Kentucky for NICAR at the end of the month. Wish me luck. And if you happen to be in any of those locations, hit me up.

Two highlights of this morning. One, waking up early enough to (mostly) finish painting the bedroom. Two, getting to the airport early enough to get a Velvet Hammer from Coffee People.

It would be neat if you could find people on WordPress.com based on topic analysis of the content they write. You could probably build a pretty neat directory with locations too.

Love how Spotify intelligently syncs any music I have marked as “Save Offline” when I stream it over cellular data. Thoughtful touch.