Last week, Jesper Andersen was talking at the Strata Data Conference about how to build a “data narrative” using social media and online information to tell a story about a neighbourhood.
He focused on San Francisco’s Haight Street and with the public information from government open data, mapping data, real estate, rental listings data with data from social services like Foursquare, Yelp and Instagram.
He looked at the safety element by finding the crime statistics from DataSF.org, and looked at an analysis of Tweets and found that, by distribution, people were more negative on the lower half of Haight. He was also able to see what people found interesting on Haight by mapping pictures from Instagram to the street as well to offer a creative Google Street View.
Story of Haight
It’s not the next Google Street View but it does offer hope inspiration to mobile application developers to use open data and social media data to tell a story.
I have been a Netflix subscriber off and on for the past couple of years. I’ve always complained that there is a lack of content for Canadian subscribers; a truck stop gas station has a better selection of video titles than Netflix (in Canada).
It’s gotten better in recent months however, especially with TV shows. Now Canadians can find Breaking Bad, Dexter, Mad Men, Walking Dead, Weeds, Kids in the Hall, and just recently all of the X-files.
Recently I was surprised by a new TV show addition released last week: Lilyhammer.
Lilyhammer is a Norwegian-American television series, starring Steve Van Zandt (The Sopranos) who plays a New York City mobster in the witness protection program starting over in Norway.
The show is quite good. I highly recommend watching it. Van Zandt isn’t an actor, but if you liked Sopranos, you can easily look past that. And what’s even more amazing is that the show is a first for Netflix, it’s their own programming venture.
The show premiered on Norwegian NRK1 on January, 25th 2012 to a record audience equal to one fifth of the Norwegian population, and two weeks later it premiered on Netflix.
Ted Sarandos, Chief Content Officer of Netflix, recently said that 60% of viewing on Netflix’s newly separated streaming business is for TV episodes, with Mad Men and Breaking Bad being most popular, and they plan on expanding their TV presence.
Last March, Netflix outbid the major TV networks for the rights to the David Fincher/Kevin Spacey drama House Of Cards (a remake of a popular British miniseries). There’s talk that Netflix may revive the cult favourite Arrested Development that saw fans of the show unsuccessfully lobby Fox to bring back.
“If you want to see what people really want, look at what they’re stealing.” - Ted Sarandos, Netflix Chief Content Officer
I really dislike where the television industry has gone, and I hope Netflix really shakes them up. I for one, won’t be cancelling my Netflix account as I had planned to later this month.
Oh, and Lilyhammer’s second season already been commissioned.
SoundCloud announced today that it has reached 10 million registered users. Last January, the music platform web site only had 3 million users.
To celebrate, SoundCloud co-founders Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss launched a new feature today called “Story Wheel,” which “allows anyone to record their own narrative around a series of images to tell a personal story.”
