Optimize Usage of Twitter With Data Mining

Twitter has become so popular and it is often thought of as very addictive and as more and more people are getting addicted to it, the more Twitter becomes an important medium for driving traffic to your website, marketing your products and services, or for just brand recognition purposes. As an internet marketer, you will always be interested in what's going on inside Twitter but with 40 million people located all over the world, it would be impossible to know it not unless you use additional tools to help you achieve this goal.

Twitter is a microblogging platform that is used by most people to inform their friends and loved ones what is curently going on in them, tweeters can also engaged in some sort of discussions and very recently more and more internet marketers use it to inform everyone about their company, business, products and services.

As an internet marketer, you will need to maximize your usage of Twitter. You may not just only need how to tweet efficiently or how you will be able to broadcast your tweets [http://moneymakingonlinetip.blogspot.com/2010/01/broadcast-your-tweets.html]. You will really need to know the current most talked about topics in twitter on a certain period of time for a certain geographical location. And by knowing this information, you will be able to define a good marketing strategy and how you can blend well with these people. Advertising in the right time and place would promise higher conversion rate translating to higher sales and earning more profits.

This can be achieved with the proper use of Data Mining Tools and Software. There is probably no such tools yet right at this moment, but for sure it will be an excellent strategy to acquire very useful information that will help you succeed in the business generated and extracted form data gathered from Twitter with the help of these Data Mining Tools and Software.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Optimize-Usage-of-Twitter-With-Data-Mining&id=3589673

Usefulness of Web Scraping Services

For any business or organization, surveys and market research play important roles in the strategic decision-making process. Data extraction and web scraping techniques are important tools that find relevant data and information for your personal or business use. Many companies employ people to copy-paste data manually from the web pages. This process is very reliable but very costly as it results to time wastage and effort. This is so because the data collected is less compared to the resources spent and time taken to gather such data.

Nowadays, various data mining companies have developed effective web scraping techniques that can crawl over thousands of websites and their pages to harvest particular information. The information extracted is then stored into a CSV file, database, XML file, or any other source with the required format. After the data has been collected and stored, data mining process can be used to extract the hidden patterns and trends contained in the data. By understanding the correlations and patterns in the data; policies can be formulated and thereby aiding the decision-making process. The information can also be stored for future reference.

The following are some of the common examples of data extraction process:

• Scrap through a government portal in order to extract the names of the citizens who are reliable for a given survey.
• Scraping competitor websites for feature data and product pricing
• Using web scraping to download videos and images for stock photography site or for website design

Automated Data Collection
It is important to note that web scraping process allows a company to monitor the website data changes over a given time frame. It also collects the data on a routine basis regularly. Automated data collection techniques are quite important as they help companies to discover customer trends and market trends. By determining market trends, it is possible to understand the customer behavior and predict the likelihood of how the data will change.

The following are some of the examples of the automated data collection:

• Monitoring price information for the particular stocks on hourly basis
• Collecting mortgage rates from the various financial institutions on the daily basis
• Checking on weather reports on regular basis as required

By using web scraping services it is possible to extract any data that is related to your business. The data can then be downloaded into a spreadsheet or a database for it to be analyzed and compared. Storing the data in a database or in a required format makes it easier for interpretation and understanding of the correlations and for identification of the hidden patterns.

Through web scraping it is possible to get quicker and accurate results and thus saving many resources in terms of money and time. With data extraction services, it is possible to fetch information about pricing, mailing, database, profile data, and competitors data on a consistent basis. With the emergence of professional data mining companies outsourcing your services will greatly reduce your costs and at the same time you are assured of high quality services.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Usefulness-of-Web-Scraping-Services&id=7181014

Why Outsourcing Data Mining Services?

Are huge volumes of raw data waiting to be converted into information that you can use? Your organization's hunt for valuable information ends with valuable data mining, which can help to bring more accuracy and clarity in decision making process.

Nowadays world is information hungry and with Internet offering flexible communication, there is remarkable flow of data. It is significant to make the data available in a readily workable format where it can be of great help to your business. Then filtered data is of considerable use to the organization and efficient this services to increase profits, smooth work flow and ameliorating overall risks.

Data mining is a process that engages sorting through vast amounts of data and seeking out the pertinent information. Most of the instance data mining is conducted by professional, business organizations and financial analysts, although there are many growing fields that are finding the benefits of using in their business.

Data mining is helpful in every decision to make it quick and feasible. The information obtained by it is used for several applications for decision-making relating to direct marketing, e-commerce, customer relationship management, healthcare, scientific tests, telecommunications, financial services and utilities.

Data mining services include:

    Congregation data from websites into excel database
    Searching & collecting contact information from websites
    Using software to extract data from websites
    Extracting and summarizing stories from news sources
    Gathering information about competitors business

In this globalization era, handling your important data is becoming a headache for many business verticals. Then outsourcing is profitable option for your business. Since all projects are customized to suit the exact needs of the customer, huge savings in terms of time, money and infrastructure can be realized.

Advantages of Outsourcing Data Mining Services:

    Skilled and qualified technical staff who are proficient in English
    Improved technology scalability
    Advanced infrastructure resources
    Quick turnaround time
    Cost-effective prices
    Secure Network systems to ensure data safety
    Increased market coverage

Outsourcing will help you to focus on your core business operations and thus improve overall productivity. So data mining outsourcing is become wise choice for business. Outsourcing of this services helps businesses to manage their data effectively, which in turn enable them to achieve higher profits.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Why-Outsourcing-Data-Mining-Services?&id=3066061

Understanding Data Mining

Well begun is half done. We can say that the invention of Internet is the greatest invention of the century which allows for quick information retrieval. It also has negative aspects, as it is an open forum therefore differentiating facts from fiction seems tough. It is the objective of every researcher to know how to perform mining of data on the Internet for accuracy of data. There are a number of search engines that provide powerful search results.

Knowing File Extensions in Data Mining

For mining data the first thing is important to know file extensions. Sites ending with dot-com are either commercial or sales sites. Since sales is involved there is a possibility that the collected information is inaccurate. Sites ending with dot-gov are of government departments, and these sites are reviewed by professionals. Sites ending with dot-org are generally for non-profit organizations. There is a possibility that the information is not accurate. Sites ending with dot-edu are of educational institutions, where the information is sourced by professionals. If you do not have an understanding you may take help of professional data mining services.

Knowing Search Engine Limitations for Data Mining

Second step is to understand when performing data mining is that majority search engines have filtering, file extension, or parameter. These are restrictions to be typed after your search term, for example: if you key in "marketing" and click "search," every site will be listed from dot-com sites having the term "marketing" on its website. If you key in "marketing site.gov," (without the quotation marks) only government department sites will be listed. If you key in "marketing site:.org" only non-profit organizations in marketing will be listed. However, if you key in "marketing site:.edu" only educational sites in marketing will be displayed. Depending on the kind of data that you want to mine after your search term you will have to enter "site.xxx", where xxx will being replaced by.com,.gov,.org or.edu.

Advanced Parameters in Data Mining

When performing data mining it is crucial to understand far beyond file extension that it is even possible to search particular terms, for example: if you are data mining for structural engineer's association of California and you key in "association of California" without quotation marks the search engine will display hundreds of sites having "association" and "California" in their search keywords. If you key in "association of California" with quotation marks, the search engine will display only sites having exactly the phrase "association of California" within the text. If you type in "association of California" site:.com, the search engine will display only sites having "association of California" in the text, from only business organizations.

If you find it difficult it is better to outsource data mining to companies like Online Web Research Services


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Understanding-Data-Mining&id=5608012

Web Data Extraction

The Internet as we know today is a repository of information that can be accessed across geographical societies. In just over two decades, the Web has moved from a university curiosity to a fundamental research, marketing and communications vehicle that impinges upon the everyday life of most people in all over the world. It is accessed by over 16% of the population of the world spanning over 233 countries.

As the amount of information on the Web grows, that information becomes ever harder to keep track of and use. Compounding the matter is this information is spread over billions of Web pages, each with its own independent structure and format. So how do you find the information you're looking for in a useful format - and do it quickly and easily without breaking the bank?

Search Isn't Enough

Search engines are a big help, but they can do only part of the work, and they are hard-pressed to keep up with daily changes. For all the power of Google and its kin, all that search engines can do is locate information and point to it. They go only two or three levels deep into a Web site to find information and then return URLs. Search Engines cannot retrieve information from deep-web, information that is available only after filling in some sort of registration form and logging, and store it in a desirable format. In order to save the information in a desirable format or a particular application, after using the search engine to locate data, you still have to do the following tasks to capture the information you need:

· Scan the content until you find the information.

· Mark the information (usually by highlighting with a mouse).

· Switch to another application (such as a spreadsheet, database or word processor).

· Paste the information into that application.

Its not all copy and paste

Consider the scenario of a company is looking to build up an email marketing list of over 100,000 thousand names and email addresses from a public group. It will take up over 28 man-hours if the person manages to copy and paste the Name and Email in 1 second, translating to over $500 in wages only, not to mention the other costs associated with it. Time involved in copying a record is directly proportion to the number of fields of data that has to copy/pasted.

Is there any Alternative to copy-paste?

A better solution, especially for companies that are aiming to exploit a broad swath of data about markets or competitors available on the Internet, lies with usage of custom Web harvesting software and tools.

Web harvesting software automatically extracts information from the Web and picks up where search engines leave off, doing the work the search engine can't. Extraction tools automate the reading, the copying and pasting necessary to collect information for further use. The software mimics the human interaction with the website and gathers data in a manner as if the website is being browsed. Web Harvesting software only navigate the website to locate, filter and copy the required data at much higher speeds that is humanly possible. Advanced software even able to browse the website and gather data silently without leaving the footprints of access.

The next article of this series will give more details about how such softwares and uncover some myths on web harvesting.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-Data-Extraction&id=575212

Data Mining And Importance to Achieve Competitive Edge in Business

What is data mining? And why it is so much importance in business? These are simple yet complicated questions to be answered, below is brief information to help understanding data and web mining services.

Mining of data in general terms can be elaborated as retrieving useful information or knowledge for further process of analyzing from various perspectives and summarizing in valuable information to be used for increasing revenue, cut cost, to gather competitive information on business or product. And data abstraction finds a great importance in business world as it help business to harness the power of accurate information thus providing competitive edge in business. May business firms and companies have their own warehouse to help them collect, organize and mine information such as transactional data, purchase data etc.

But to have a mining services and warehouse at premises is not affordable and not very cost effective to solution for reliable information solutions. But as if taking out of information is the need for every business now days. Many companies are providing accurate and effective data and web data mining solutions at reasonable price.

Outsourcing information abstraction services are offered at affordable rates and it is available for wide range of data mine solutions:

• taking out business data
• service to gather data sets
• digging information of datasets
• Website data mining
• stock market information
• Statistical information
• Information classification
• Information regression
• Structured data analysis
• Online mining of data to gather product details
• to gather prices
• to gather product specifications
• to gather images

Outsource web mining solutions and data gathering solutions has been effective in terms of cost cutting, increasing productivity at affordable rates. Benefits of data mining services include:

• clear customer, service or product understanding
• less or minimal marketing cost
• exact information on sales, transactions
• detection of beneficial patterns
• minimizing risk and increased ROI
• new market detection
• Understanding clear business problems and goals

Accurate data mining solutions could prove to be an effective way to cut down cost by concentrating on right place.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining-And-Importance-to-Achieve-Competitive-Edge-in-Business&id=5771888

Top Data Mining Tools

Data mining is important because it means pulling out critical information from vast amounts of data. The key is to find the right tools used for the expressed purposes of examining data from any number of viewpoints and effectively summarize it into a useful data set.

Many of the tools used to organize this data have become computer based and are typically referred to as knowledge discovery tools.

Listed below are the top data mining tools in the industry:

    Insightful Miner - This tool has the best selection of ETL functions of any data mining tool on the market. This allows the merging, appending, sorting and filtering of data.
    SQL Server 2005 Data Mining Add-ins for Office 2007 - These are great add-ins for taking advantage of SQL Server 2005 predictive analytics in Office Excel 2007 and Office Visio 2007. The add-ins Allow you to go through the entire development lifecycle within Excel 2007 by using either a spreadsheet or external data accessible through your SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services instance.
    Rapidminder - Also known as YALE is a pretty comprehensive and arguably world-leading when it comes to an open-source data mining solution. it is widely used from a large number of companies an organizations. Even though it is open-source, this tool, out of the box provides a secure environment and provides enterprise capable support and services so you will not be left out in the cold.

The list is short but ever changing in order to meet the increasing demands of companies to provide useful information from years of data.

TonyRocks.com in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania is one of only a few companies in the region that offer data tools an strategies.

They also keep a nice and updated list of the the latest on new tools in integration strategies for your organization.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Top-Data-Mining-Tools&id=1380551

Web Data Extraction Services and Data Collection Form Website Pages

For any business market research and surveys plays crucial role in strategic decision making. Web scrapping and data extraction techniques help you find relevant information and data for your business or personal use. Most of the time professionals manually copy-paste data from web pages or download a whole website resulting in waste of time and efforts.

Instead, consider using web scraping techniques that crawls through thousands of website pages to extract specific information and simultaneously save this information into a database, CSV file, XML file or any other custom format for future reference.

Examples of web data extraction process include:
• Spider a government portal, extracting names of citizens for a survey
• Crawl competitor websites for product pricing and feature data
• Use web scraping to download images from a stock photography site for website design

Automated Data Collection
Web scraping also allows you to monitor website data changes over stipulated period and collect these data on a scheduled basis automatically. Automated data collection helps you discover market trends, determine user behavior and predict how data will change in near future.

Examples of automated data collection include:
• Monitor price information for select stocks on hourly basis
• Collect mortgage rates from various financial firms on daily basis
• Check whether reports on constant basis as and when required

Using web data extraction services you can mine any data related to your business objective, download them into a spreadsheet so that they can be analyzed and compared with ease.

In this way you get accurate and quicker results saving hundreds of man-hours and money!

With web data extraction services you can easily fetch product pricing information, sales leads, mailing database, competitors data, profile data and many more on a consistent basis.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Web-Data-Extraction-Services-and-Data-Collection-Form-Website-Pages&id=4860417

Data Entry Services For Organization - Outsource Data Entry Services

It is unimportant that you have a small business or big organization to serve large audience. Information is an important aspect for any size or kind of company. In business, profitability is main focus. Currently, there is constant fluctuation in business world. Every business has to be dynamic with high tempo.

In such a high pressured business environment, quick accessibility of accurate and detailed information is essential. If you know more about your customer, industry, trend and other factor which affect your business, you can quickly compare your business and increase the value. To manage such requirements, data entry services are the best option. Typing services not only control all information but also control information management effectively.

For any business that wants to extract data from any source, data entry services are necessity. Different types of businesses require different services. Some organizations choose offline data typing services while other gives significance to online data typing services. The main purpose of data typing services are same - organizing data properly for future use. Data typing services also include image entry, book entry, card entry, hand-written entry, legal document entry, insurance claim entry and other.

The general idea about data entry services are entering data into business database. But it's not just; it also includes data collection, extraction and processing. Such typing task is very time consuming. These tasks can be performed quickly and efficiently by data typing expert. So, such professionals are in high demand.

Some years ago, it was assumed that only in-house personnel could really understand the company's products or services. But today, various business process outsourcing companies are having typing experts who are quite knowledgeable in almost every field of business. They can easily manage your requirements and deliver the best result.

Typing service companies can manage your information with higher efficiency and produce quicker result. In current scenario, business organizations do not waver to outsource the typing task. Now, most of the companies are outsourcing their typing task and getting benefit of higher productivity and profitability.

Business organizations have understood the importance of managing information and necessity of data entry services.



Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Entry-Services-For-Organization---Outsource-Data-Entry-Services&id=4122068

What is Data Mining? Why Data Mining is Important?

Searching, Collecting, Filtering and Analyzing of data define as data mining. The large amount of information can be retrieved from wide range of form such as different data relationships, patterns or any significant statistical co-relations. Today the advent of computers, large databases and the internet is make easier way to collect millions, billions and even trillions of pieces of data that can be systematically analyzed to help look for relationships and to seek solutions to difficult problems.

The government, private company, large organization and all businesses are looking for large volume of information collection for research and business development. These all collected data can be stored by them to future use. Such kind of information is most important whenever it is require. It will take very much time for searching and find require information from the internet or any other resources.

Here is an overview of data mining services inclusion:

* Market research, product research, survey and analysis
* Collection information about investors, funds and investments
* Forums, blogs and other resources for customer views/opinions
* Scanning large volumes of data
* Information extraction
* Pre-processing of data from the data warehouse
* Meta data extraction
* Web data online mining services
* data online mining research
* Online newspaper and news sources information research
* Excel sheet presentation of data collected from online sources
* Competitor analysis
* data mining books
* Information interpretation
* Updating collected data

After applying the process of data mining, you can easily information extract from filtered information and processing the refining the information. This data process is mainly divided into 3 sections; pre-processing, mining and validation. In short, data online mining is a process of converting data into authentic information.

The most important is that it takes much time to find important information from the data. If you want to grow your business rapidly, you must take quick and accurate decisions to grab timely available opportunities.

Outsourcing Web Research is one of the best data mining outsourcing organizations having more than 17 years of experience in the market research industry. To know more information about our company please contact us.

Outsourcing Web Research is one of the best data mining outsourcing organizations having more than 17 years of experience in the market research industry. To know more information about our company please contact us at: http://www.outsourcingwebresearch.com/data-mining.php OR send your data mining needs on info@outsourcingwebresearch.com.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?What-is-Data-Mining?-Why-Data-Mining-is-Important?&id=3613677

Data Scraping Wikipedia

I often use datasets found on Wikipedia as illustrative examples when I’m teaching or playing around with new statistical techniques. It is probably one of the easiest ways to find varied, real-world data sources out there. The major downside is actually getting the data into a format that I can manipulate in R. Generally this results in a lot of copy-and-pasting and manual translation of the the data. I've never been happy with this method. However, I recently discovered two extremely simple ways around this problem.

Method 1: Google Docs (or any other spreadsheet program)

The first and simplest method is literally a one line solution using Google Docs spreadsheets. Specifically this involves the importHTML function.

Let’s say that I want to import the breakdown of per capita alcohol consumption by country (link).  This is a fairly well formatted table so I could probably just copy and past it into my spreadsheet program du jour but this is a cleaner solution. Open up a Google Doc spreadsheet and type the following function call into one of the cells

=ImportHTML("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption","table",2)

The syntax of this function is easy enough to understand. The first argument is the address of the HTML page you want to pull the table from. The second argument tells the function too look for a table (as opposed to a list object). The third argument specifies which table you want. Wikipedia defaults the Table 1 to the table of contents (if there is one) in their HTML files. From here it is a simple matter of exporting the spreadsheet in your favorite format and loading it into R.

I personally use Google Docs but I know that most spreadsheet programs have some sort of HTML/XML scraping function that works well with the predictably formatted tables of Wikipedia.

Method 2: XML Library in R

The XML library in R replicates this same functionality in only a few lines of code. The readHTMLTable function is the analog to importHTML  from Google Docs. This thread at Stack Overflow provides a good breakdown of this function.

Example

Below is an example graphic I made comparing the per capita alcohol consumption to  country's gross national income (GNI) per capita as defined by the World Bank. Even though there isn't much of a pattern in this data, being able to throw examples like this together in about 10 minutes could definitely help provide some additional flavor to examples in a statistics class.


Source: http://bugbee.me/blog/2013/4/5/data-scraping-wikipedia

Is Web Scraping Relevant in Today's Business World?

Different techniques and processes have been created and developed over time to collect and analyze data. Web scraping is one of the processes that have hit the business market recently. It is a great process that offers businesses with vast amounts of data from different sources such as websites and databases.

It is good to clear the air and let people know that data scraping is legal process. The main reason is in this case is because the information or data is already available in the internet. It is important to know that it is not a process of stealing information but rather a process of collecting reliable information. Most people have regarded the technique as unsavory behavior. Their main basis of argument is that with time the process will be over flooded and therefore lead to parity in plagiarism.

We can therefore simply define web scraping as a process of collecting data from a wide variety of different websites and databases. The process can be achieved either manually or by the use of software. The rise of data mining companies has led to more use of the web extraction and web crawling process. Other main functions such companies are to process and analyze the data harvested. One of the important aspects about these companies is that they employ experts. The experts are aware of the viable keywords and also the kind of information which can create usable statistic and also the pages that are worth the effort. Therefore the role of data mining companies is not limited to mining of data but also help their clients be able to identify the various relationships and also build the models.

Some of the common methods of web scraping used include web crawling, text gripping, DOM parsing, and expression matching. The latter process can only be achieved through parsers, HTML pages or even semantic annotation. Therefore there are many different ways of scraping the data but most importantly they work towards the same goal. The main objective of using web scraping service is to retrieve and also compile data contained in databases and websites. This is a must process for a business to remain relevant in the business world.

The main questions asked about web scraping touch on relevance. Is the process relevant in the business world? The answer to this question is yes. The fact that it is employed by large companies in the world and has derived many rewards says it all. It is important to note that many people regarded this technology as a plagiarism tool and others consider it as a useful tool that harvests the data required for the business success.

Using of web scraping process to extract data from the internet for competition analysis is highly recommended. If this is the case, then you must be sure to spot any pattern or trend that can work in a given market.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Is-Web-Scraping-Relevant-in-Todays-Business-World?&id=7091414

Data Mining's Importance in Today's Corporate Industry

A large amount of information is collected normally in business, government departments and research & development organizations. They are typically stored in large information warehouses or bases. For data mining tasks suitable data has to be extracted, linked, cleaned and integrated with external sources. In other words, it is the retrieval of useful information from large masses of information, which is also presented in an analyzed form for specific decision-making.

Data mining is the automated analysis of large information sets to find patterns and trends that might otherwise go undiscovered. It is largely used in several applications such as understanding consumer research marketing, product analysis, demand and supply analysis, telecommunications and so on. Data Mining is based on mathematical algorithm and analytical skills to drive the desired results from the huge database collection.

It can be technically defined as the automated mining of hidden information from large databases for predictive analysis. Web mining requires the use of mathematical algorithms and statistical techniques integrated with software tools.

Data mining includes a number of different technical approaches, such as:

    Clustering
    Data Summarization
    Learning Classification Rules
    Finding Dependency Networks
    Analyzing Changes
    Detecting Anomalies

The software enables users to analyze large databases to provide solutions to business decision problems. Data mining is a technology and not a business solution like statistics. Thus the data mining software provides an idea about the customers that would be intrigued by the new product.

It is available in various forms like text, web, audio & video data mining, pictorial data mining, relational databases, and social networks. Data mining is thus also known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases since it involves searching for implicit information in large databases. The main kinds of data mining software are: clustering and segmentation software, statistical analysis software, text analysis, mining and information retrieval software and visualization software.

Data Mining therefore has arrived on the scene at the very appropriate time, helping these enterprises to achieve a number of complex tasks that would have taken up ages but for the advent of this marvelous new technology.


Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Minings-Importance-in-Todays-Corporate-Industry&id=2057401