emails on SickCity development [1]

Daniel Greenblatt
to John Geraci
cc LeChfeck
Paul Watson
date Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 11:02 PM
subject Re: making SickCity more accurate

I agree that in order to get any kind of normalized data we need to be talking about 'sick' tweets as a percentage of all tweets (on a given day) and not an absolute number. So I will work (this weekend, I hope) on putting in some code to fetch the total amount of tweets in a city on any given day. Some questions:

1) Is it okay if we just do this from the current time forward, or do we want the backdated information as well? i realize that ideally we want this info for all tracked cities for all days, but perhaps i'll start by getting the total count for current days onwards.

2) Paul - any idea on how to do this from a database perspective? anything more elegant than having a single table that tracks city_id, date and tweet_count? (would have a looooot of records, but very little data for each record).

Dan