To answer your question about the normalized post results….

We normalize posts as a percentage of overall conversations collected each day. We do this because we use our own proprietary crawler to collect data rather than APIs (this allows for better data consistency & reduced duplicate posts/spam among other things). Our crawler started collecting content from a mere few thousand sources in January of 2007 and has crawled from link to link to find new sources ever since. We are now pulling data from millions of sources all around the world.

When you are taking a look at short time ranges (a few months or less) the differences between normalized and absolute post counts are difficult to distinguish, but when looking at long time ranges (the tool allows 3 years on any topic) you see an overall increase in post counts for any and all topics because of the increase in the number of sources we are tracking. Hence the option for normalized post counts.

Thanks again Marshall! Looking forward to the rest of the series.

Best,

Brooks

VP, Biz Dev
Infegy Inc.
brooks[at]infegy.com