I was in a conference sometime back and Deolu Akinyemi made a valid point when he said the easiest way to be abreast with emerging businesses and business ideas Nigeria is by monitoring business trends from an intense discussion board like nairaland.

Great opinion polls like gallup and others usually base their ratings from few sample data or surveys from few persons and this has been very effective in predicting the direction of events and trends.

I recently noticed that one can basically tell the trend in nigeria from data or information gathered from the different news portals, forums, blogs and nigeria centered social media circles.

I have been trying to build an application that can robostly give a very comprehensive data on current trends in the business, career, events, entertainment, personalities etc.

This will very much help people make very important decisions like what career path to take, which political figure is more popular, what online/online business or business idea is trending and general what is hot.

I will like to have inputs, ideas, and suggestions from Nairalanders on how to make the ratings(trends) more accurate and dependable.

It's more of the algorithm to access to data.

You need to chose a few sources only.
And then the ugly part, manually access the data or develop a key-word algorithm or some sort of an advanced algorithm.


Note: Nairaland front page does not show an accurate description of what is trending. Pls, don't give it much points when developing the algorithm

@spikes C,

You are definitely right about Nairaland frontpage, I noticed it pays more attention to issures people can discuss about rather than the trends generally. Nairaland is a forum so it is expected to ankle topics that can be easily discussed on the frontpage.

As a web app programmer, I spend of my time on the web master section of NL and the webmaster sections gives you a descent idea what is really hot in the Nigeria "Webosphere" and you will also notice that good topics from the webmaster section hardly make frontpage.

I am certainly using only sources whose data are verifiable to build up my database. Data gathering will be manual because of the accuracy and effectiveness of the results we intend to get.

The bulk of the programming is on the the algorithm manipulating the data.