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Comment on How the Digg team was acquihired

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I'd like to know more about why a failing news site had 2 data scientists on the payroll.

I remember Digg Labs produced some really cool animated real-time visualisations of stories on the site.

A little Googling suggests that they were collaborations. But I wonder if the data scientists were also involved

http://v1.stamen.com/clients/digg.html http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=585

No, the Stamen work happened before we had any data scientists on payroll.

Edit: We did have an R&D team that did things that might today be considered data science, but at the time they were mostly focused on documenting and optimizing the Digg "algorithm"

I’d like to know why it took them dumping logs into hive to see the traffic came from one article.

I think these two “data scientists” were probably called webmaster or sysadmin and it took them coming in the next morning and grepping the log files. Or looking at google analytics which existed at the time. I don’t remember if real-time was free in 2010, but it could easily tell referrals and passthroughs.

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