This week's episode explores the possibilities of extracting novel
insights from the many great social web APIs available. Matthew
Russell's Mining the
Social Web is a fantastic exploration of the tools and
methods, and we explore a few related topics.

One helpful feature of the book is it's use of a Vagrant virtual machine.
Using it, readers can easily reproduce the examples from the book,
and there's a short video available that will walk you
through setting up the
Mining the Social Web virtual machine.

The book also has an accompanying github repository which can be
found here.

A quote from Matthew that particularly reasonates for me was "The
first commandment of Data Science is to 'Know thy data'." Take a
listen for a little more context around this sage advice.

In addition to the book, we also discuss some of the work done
by Digital
Reasoning where Matthew serves as CTO. One of their
products we spend some time discussing is Synthesys,
a service that processes unstructured data and delivers knowledge
and insight extracted from the data.

Some listeners might already be familiar with Digital Reasoning
from recent coverage in Fortune Magazine on their cognitive
computing efforts.

For his benevolent recommendation, Matthew recommends
the Hardcore
History Podcast, and for his self-serving recommendation,
Matthew mentioned that they are currently hiring for Data Science job
opportunities at Digital Reasoning if any listeners are
looking for new opportunities.