We provide a description of Peckalytics, its technology and functionality. Peckalytics processes the entire Twitter data stream in real time and provides a flexible search interface to identify experts in any topic area as well as users with interests in any topic. It provides flexible analytics around sets of experts, their followers as well as sets of users with specific interests. The system is implemented to scale for large data sizes. At the time of this writing it operates on an archive of 30 billion tweets, with 220,000 new tweets crawled every minute. In addition to raw tweets, the social graph of users, and profile information, Peckalytics makes novel use of Twitter lists to assess the expertise of different users. Our aim is to facilitate targeting and optimization of advertising campaigns on the Twitter platform.

User generated content that appears on weblogs, wikis and social networks has been increasing at an unprecedented rate. The wealth of information produced by individuals from different geographical locations presents a challenging task of intelligent processing. In this paper, we introduce a methodology to identify notable geographically focused events out of this collection of user generated information. At the heart of our proposal lie efficient algorithms that identify geographically focused information bursts, attribute them to demographic factors and identify sets of descriptive keywords. We present the results of a prototype evaluation of our algorithms on BlogScope, a large-scale social media warehousing platform. We demonstrate the scalability and practical utility of our proposal running on top of a multi-terabyte text collection.

We are experiencing an unprecedented increase of content contributed by users in forums such as blogs, social networking sites and microblogging services. Such abundance of content complements content on web sites and traditional media forums such as news papers, news and financial streams, and so on. Given such plethora of information there is a pressing need to cross reference information across textual services. For example, commonly we read a news item and we wonder if there are any blogs reporting related content or vice versa.

User generated content has been fueling an explosion in the amount of available textual data. In this context, it is also common for users to express, either explicitly (through numerical ratings) or implicitly, their views and opinions on products, events, etc. This wealth of textual information necessitates the development of novel searching and data exploration paradigms. In this paper we propose a new searching model, similar in spirit to faceted search, that enables the progressive refinement of a keyword-query result. However, in contrast to faceted search which utilizes domain-specific and hard-to-extract document attributes, the refinement process is driven by suggesting interesting expansions of the original query with additional search terms. Our query-driven and domain-neutral approach employs surprising word co-occurrence patterns and (optionally) numerical user ratings in order to identify meaningful top- k query expansions and allow one to focus on a particularly interesting subset of the original result set. The proposed functionality is supported by a framework that is computationally efficient and nimble in terms of storage requirements. Our solution is grounded on Convex Optimization principles that allow us to exploit the pruning opportunities offered by the natural top- k formulation of our problem. The performance benefits offered by our solution are verified using both synthetic data and large real data sets comprised of blog posts.

A variety of web sites and web based services produce textual lists at varying time granularities ranked according to several criteria. For example, Google Trends produces lists of popular query keywords which can be visualized according to several criteria. At Flickr, lists of popular tags used to tag the images uploaded can be visualized as a cloud based on their popularity. Identification of the k most popular terms can be easily conducted by utilizing well known rank aggregation algorithms.

We present BlogScope (www.blogscope.net), a system for analyzing the Blogosphere. BlogScope is an information discovery and text analysis system that offers a set of unique features. Such features include, spatio-temporal analysis of blogs, flexible navigation of the Blogosphere through information bursts, keyword correlations and burst synopsis, as well as enhanced ranking functions for improved query answer relevance. We describe the system, its design and the features of the current version of BlogScope.