Baking Blogs, Pinterest and Big Data

      Rebecca and I initially got interested in the effect that Pinterest had on baking blogs after noticing that one of BrownEyedBaker's more popular recipes had an interesting timeline for the comments. The blog (http://www.browneyedbaker.com/2008/06/21/thick-and-chewy-chocolate-chip-cookies/) had a medium amount of comments when it was posted in 2008, very little in 2009, and then the number of comments steadily increased after 2010. We hypothesized that this was due to the creation and rise of Pinterest in 2010.

    Below is a link to the presentation we made for our project that examined other blogs and numbers of comments on their recipes. We also looked into why this trend applied to BrownEyedBaker but not to another popular baking blog Bakerella. We used a website called PinPuff.com to calcularte the pinfluence score. This was calculated by looking at the  number of followers (reach), activity (number of pins, boards, and likes), and virality. What was interesting to me was that I have no idea how PinPuff  gets all the information and then turns it into a score. I would assume that there is some ranking system used where pins are more highly weighted than likes. Also, I wonder how it's taken into account that a person follows a user versus a user's board. Something else, I wonder if it takes into account original pins versus repins from other users. That would be an application were data mining could come into play.

    An interesting extension to this project would be to come up with a different ranking system (or use pinpuff scores if necessary) to predict how a baking blogger's audience/number of comments will be affected by pinterest based on their pinterest usage. Obviously, this would mean to examine a lot more baking blogs, recipes from each blog, and pinterest profiles in order to come up with an accurate system. A more standardized method of mining and then cleansing the data would be useful for this step because there were posts with over a thousand comments that were difficult to get data easily from with the methods we used.
   

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1U19ria5ABirlba0eYNIDcK3VPzH9rX3Bc5XXg5hX4VU/edit#slide=id.p