Mining the Social Web

Chapter 3. Mailboxes: Oldies but Goodies

This chapter introduces some fundamental tools and techniques for analyzing your mail—a classic data staple of the Internet that despite all of the advances in social networking will still be around for ages to come—to answer questions such as:

• Who sends out the most mail?

• Is there a particular time of the day (or day of the week) when the sender is most likely to get a response to a question?

• Which people send the most messages among one another?

• What are the subjects of the liveliest discussion threads?

Although social media sites are racking up petabytes of near-real-time social data, there is still the significant drawback that, unlike email, social networking data is centrally managed by a service provider who gets to create the rules about exactly how you can access it and what you can and can’t do with it.^[12] Mail data, on the other hand, is largely decentralized and is scattered across the Web in the form of rich mailing list discussions about a litany of interesting topics. Although it’s true that service providers such as Google and Yahoo! restrict your use of mailing list data if you retrieve it using their services, there are slightly less formidable ways to mine the content that have a higher probability of success: you can easily collect data yourself by subscribing to a list and waiting for the box to start filling up, ask the list owner to provide you with an archive, etc. Another interesting consideration is that unlike ...