DataSift: Sentiment, inflection points and WikiStats

Nick Halstead, Founder & CTO, Datasift 

We're expressing opinions all the time on the web, via Twitter, via Facebook, via multiple sources - and that's all data. And Nick Halstead and DataSift take that data and, well sift it... As well as drawing out sentiment and analysing it, they're also interested in inflection; most day's there's a certain baseline discussion about a company. If it suddenly changes, that's worth noting.

The world of SEO is worth billions - now 50% of traffic to some sites comes from social media. How do you optimise that? DataSift take a cross-section of five news stories and analyse how people are reacting to them. Publishers can then tweak headlines and stories based on the information.

Wikipedia has peaks of 100 edits per second. No-one has ever captured this. Datasift allows you to filter against that content and see changes - it's an amazing resource for researchers, wanting to know how things change. WikiStats looks at all those edits in real time and looks for trends. 

Big data in practical use.