From a simple perspective, "analytics" for the end user means three things: Data + Processing + Display. While purists may say analytics is just the processing, the old adage of "garbage in / garbage out" is apt. So too is the recognition  that great data with great processing can still leave you scratching your head if you can see what is important.

All of this is to say I found it interesting to read that NBC has added a live twitter "pulse" analysis for the Olympics. At the moment I would guess it is must another gimmick to generate buzz. However, there could be real value in what it does.

The purpose of Twitter Pulse is to show the relative volume of tweets and the topics they represent.

Data: The data is Twitter but its not clear how they select tweets about the Olympics vs. all other tweets. For now, we will assume its a good data set.

Processing: Next, there is some type of analysis – presumable to pull out key words such as the sport, the interest, some data keys ("video", "medal", etc.) locations, athletes, and so on. All of this data is processed for one metric, "volume of traffic".

Display: the "volume of traffic" metric controls a box size. The other data keys are used to generate some text overlay and to choose a suitable background image. All of this is then rendered "tree map".

What does it mean ? OR more important to a company, what use is it ?

The resulting data could indicate what people are interested in seeing and thus influence what what content is broadcast as well as what types of advertising will have the highest impact. If this were trusted, then it could impact the cost of advertising as well as the size and demographic of the audience.

However, we need to remember the data set – Twitter. So perhaps this is not a sufficiently accurate sampling to make changes to broadcast content. But, what about using the data to change web content ? It could be a good predictor of web site traffic and thus advertisement selection and placement as well as to focus content.

As an aside, I found it interesting that over the 30 minutes or so of watching the Twitter Pulse, the sport of Curling rarely dropped out of the top 1/3rd of the graph’s boxes.

My observation of "analytics" is that success requires all three disciplines working in concert and more often than not, there are three distinct skill sets – data management, processing, and visualization. If you are interesting in the display component, you might be interesting is looking at "Many Eyes" which not only provides visualization of data set but also lets users share their discoveries – a kind of "social data processing" capability.

I didn’t like the control screen since all of the buttons for the Popcorn Hour did not fit when the iPod Touch was in landscape mode. in I redid a few buttons and redrafted the layout. It’s more compact than before but it now works in both orientations. 

I updated the original download from the previous post.

Over at the NetworkMediaTank forum I discovered Niels Leenheer had created a great Adobe AIR controller for the Popcorn Hour appropriately named “MediaController“. He also created a lesser well known web based controller for the iPhone (but that he did not have an iPhone, he has not promoted it much).

I downloaded the controller and and one I found the installation instructions* I had it up and running and working with my iPhone Touch. However, it was not very rich so I decided to start working on it. There were two pet peeves – very few actual controls were implemented and the lists of content were by “create date” and not alphabetical.

So, first I set out to find graphics to simulate a remote control. I did not find anything I liked so I used GIMP to create a full set. Next, I had to add a lot of command controls to the and get the layout of all the buttons I wanted. The layout was a bit of trial and error and the command controls was a combination of reading the NMT Wiki and a lot of cut/copy/paste and batch editing.

The image is what I ended up with for the control buttons. Along the way, I also fixed the sorting bug. I’m not 100% happy with the button layout but it’s close. I also do not know enough to do the right things to the button layout when the device is rotated. I’ll eventually dig into that.

If you are curious why I went through this exercise, it’s because there is a good change the Popcorn Hour will be buried in a cabinet in my home office far from the TV and thus the IR remote will not work.

BTW: the trick to the install is to …

1. copy the “controller” directory to the root of the Popcorn Hour’s internal HDD
2. you will need tenlet support enabled (I think)
3. insure the myiHome Server is running on the Popcorn Hour
4. point your iPhone / iPod Touch browser to:

   http://YourPopcornHour_IP:8088/stream/file=/opt/sybhttpd/localhost.drives/HARD_DISK/controller/index.php

The last 3D image had too much parallax so this time I tried two images with only about 8"-12" of separation. I still used the lame cellphone camera and did a bunch of positioning in GIMP to adjust for the errors in my images.

If you have a pair of those red/cyan 3-D glasses (perhaps from this year’s Supper Bowl), could you take a look at this image and tell me if it works correctly. You will get a 768×1024 image if you click on the thumbnail here.

I created this anaglyph using GIMP and a script called of all things”script-fu-make-anaglyph”. If you are interested in the manual steps involved, there is an easy to follow tutorial (one for GIMP and another for Photoshop).

My two source images were just “junk" shots I took with my cell phone. If this works, and I get my own red/cyan 3D glasses, I’ll go back and process some of my good quality pictures as well as try a few new ones here on the shore.

If this has peaked your interest, you can find many anaglyph images with a Google search.