On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 8:08 PM, Nancy M <nmira...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I do like the maps, but 50% error -- you would not possibly get on an
> airplane with that kind of error rate, would you? And I don't think
> I'd want to make decisions about my demographics on something with
> that error rate either. Why not take the IPS and bounce them against
> whois or something?
This app isn't about that; it's about what places a person is talking about.
You can't use their IP's, the point is to identify locations in the text of
their tweets. (I asked whether the app was looking at the author's location
to help disambiguate because i thought it could be used to improve accuracy;
but this is hypothetical.)
In defense of error rates, if the task is just to get a sense about what
regions of the world someone tends to talk about, then something like a 10%
or 20% error rate might be ok; and it was lower than that for Chris's and
some of the other example twitter users the app was suggesting.
But here's one case where errors are very bad. One thing I thought was
great about the map UI was that you can see a flag all by itself out in
mexico or something, and be curious what the person is saying about mexico,
and click on it to see the message. If errors tend to be geographic
outliers then they really hurt this use case since geographic outliers are
easy to see and are interesting simply because they are unusual ("oh,
brendan's always boring and talks about california, but look, one time he
talked about switzerland! oops, not really.")
I think the issue with some of the errors the yahoo placemaker thing was
making with my tweets is, is that it's not integrating very well prior
information about how commonly those locations are talked about. I think
"scala" is only rarely used to mean the switzerland canton, but is quite
often used to mean the programming language; but placemaker is happy to use
a rare, unlikely sense of "scala" here.
--
Brendan O'Connor - http://anyall.org
