PeopleBrowsr: Next-Generation Social Media Analysis for Humanitarian Response?
As noted in this blog post on “Data Philanthropy for Humanitarian Response,” members of the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHNetwork) are still using manual methods for media monitoring. When the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) activated the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) to crisis map Libya last year, for example, SBTF volunteers manually monitored hundreds of Twitter handles, news sites for several weeks.
SBTF volunteers (Mapsters) do not have access to a smart microtasking platform that could have distributed the task in more efficient ways. Nor do they have access to even semi-automated tools for content monitoring and information retrieval. Instead, they used a Google Spreadsheet to list the sources they were manually monitoring and turned this spreadsheet into a sign-up sheet where each Mapster could sign on for 3-hour shifts every day. The SBTF is basically doing “crowd computing” using the equivalent of a typewriter.
Meanwhile, companies like Crimson Hexagon, NetBase, RecordedFuture and several others have each developed sophisticated ways to monitor social and/or mainstream media for various private sector applications such as monitoring brand perception. So my colleague Nazila kindly introduced me to her colleagues at PeopleBrowsr after reading my post on Data Philanthropy. Last week, Marc from PeopleBrowsr gave me a thorough tour of the platform. I was definitely impressed and am excited that Marc wants us to pilot the platform in support of the Digital Humanitarian Network. So what’s the big deal about PeopleBrowsr? To begin with, the platform has access to 1,000 days of social media data and over 3 terabytes of social data per month.
To put this in terms of information velocity, PeopleBrowsr receives 10,000 social media posts per second from a variety of sources including Twitter, Facebook, fora and blogs. On the latter, they monitor posts from over 40 million blogs including all of Tumblr, Posterious, Blogspot and every WordPress-hosted site. They also pull in content from YouTube and Flickr. (Click on the screenshots below to magnify them).
