Tag Archives: review signal

Playing With Data for Fun and Profit (SlideShare Presentation)

Original post from my personal blog

I was asked to talk at Howard University to their digital business class, which focuses on the use of Social Media, Mobile Apps & Platforms, Data Analytics, and Cloud Computing as strategic assets to be utilized in business.

If anyone is curious to learn about the history of Review Signal and where the idea came:

I also built a demo to let the students learn about and play with sentiment analysis in real-time. It used the Movie Review corpus from Cornell. It's a very primitive keyword based system but I thought illustrated the concept well.

Sentiment Analysis Demo

The demo is the close to the first try I made at sentiment analysis. What is in use at Review Signal is infinitely more complex, but if you're curious to learn about sentiment analysis and prefer visual learning, I think it suits that purpose well.

Which Programming Languages, Frameworks and Databases are used at Web Hosting Companies

This is just a small piece of a hopefully bigger article analyzing what I've been looking at in the Review Signal data.

X-Axis: Programming Languages, Frameworks, Databases

Y-Axis: Web Hosting Company

Colors: The deeper the green, the more positive. The deeper the red, the more negative.

What stories do you see?

Graph of Web Hosting Ratings at Review Signal Since Launch

Happy Staturday!

I didn't quite finish porting the D3 / Rickshaw version of this to WordPress, so that users can explore the data themselves. So that will probably be next Staturday. However, I wanted to share a preview visualizing how the rankings at Review Signal have changed over time.

A few interesting points are this month, August 2013, you can see the four major EIG brands we track drop (BlueHost, HostGator, HostMonster, JustHost). We see WPEngine come down to mortal levels. We see the rise of DigitalOcean. I will do a more thorough investigation when the interactive chart gets published.

 

[Click Graph to Enlarge]

web_hosts_overall_rating_monthly_changes

Digital Ocean Logo

Introducing Digital Ocean – Low Cost SSD VPS Provider

We are happy to announce Digital Ocean has been added to Review Signal today.

Read our 1,200+ Digital Ocean Reviews or use Promo Code SSDTWTTR to get $10 Free Credit.

Digital Ocean is a relatively new provider in the cloud vps hosting space and has skyrocketed in popularity (over 5,000% in the past six months!). It seems that their explosive growth is backed up by the data we've collected. Digital Ocean has an overall rating of 81% at the this time. That's the highest rated web hosting company on Review Signal at the time of writing.

As of yesterday, Digital Ocean has opened up a second data center in New York (NY2) and now offers San Franciso, New York and Amsterdam as locations. Their plans start at $5/month for a 512MB (RAM) and 20GB SSD of space.

Congratulations and welcome to Digital Ocean!

Imagining a Better Review Site

I was a pretty unsatisfied consumer. There are so many review sites and so few that I actually trust. Other than my few trusted review sites which covered very specific topics, I was lost and confused about who to trust for information. Asking friends only went so far and people often give conflicting opinions. I searched what a lot of people were saying but there was no easy way to find any sort of consensus. There were always questions, and I often felt like I didn't have enough information to make a good decision.

It was a year and a half ago, I had just finished my Master's thesis about using Twitter data to predict box office sales for movies based on word of mouth. Then, it occurred to me, we don't write reviews, we talk with friends. Reviews are embedded into our every day conversations, and every single person on earth does it. We talk about what we like and dislike but it doesn't happen to be written in 'review' format. What if I could collect that data and make sense of it all?

I am proud to introduce Review Signal: a new kind of review site based on what people really think.

Our goals are simple:

  • Be transparent about where each opinion comes from and source it to the original location
  • Define very clearly how things are rated in an easy to understand way

Review Signal has been launched covering our first market: web hosting reviews. We've gathered a list of some of the most popular web hosting companies and collected over 100,000 opinions expressed about them. We've analyzed them and even broken down some important and hard-to-measure values such as how satisfied people are with the support offered by a company.

Visit Web Hosting Reviews at Review Signal

Web hosting is just the start. We would love to review everything, but we're also realistic about what we can do and how fast we can do it.  We will expand to other niches as fast as we can while still maintaining our strict quality standards.  If there is some market you're unhappy with and think we can make a difference, we would love to hear from you!  We also look forward to any and all feedback, suggestions, ideas and criticisms.  Contact us.

Kevin Ohashi

Founder