"... Now for lesson 2: make data collection and analysis easy. I chose Twitter as my data entry point. I use Twitter already (especially with my new phone with

"... Now for lesson 2: make data collection and analysis easy. I chose Twitter as my data entry point. I use Twitter already (especially with my new phone with the QWERTY keyboard), so it wasn't a huge burden to start tweeting what I eat. I created my own Twitter bot and created my own basic language. ..." An interesting article not so much because of it's application but method. This is pretty much what Stikkit (Rael Dornfest ~ http://www.raelity.org/blog/ http://www.raelity.org/blog/ ), now working for Twiiter was doing - grabbing data, parsing it and trying to make some sense of it. The key bit here is how. If you try using regex, NLP or some other novel technique that relies on understanding ... it will probably not work. Now if you have a big enough data set, machine learning techniques might be a better tack.