For the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on producing movies every year, predicting how they'll perform at the box office is still more art than science. The best metric, at the moment, is nothing more than counting the number of theaters carrying the film on opening weekend. But a new method that takes the pulse of the general public via Wikipedia activity can predict how a movie will fare up to a month before it hits theaters.
The Web has produced lots of interesting real-time analytics---everything from the current moods of Twitter users
to the locations of every plane in the sky above you
. But what's less well-understood is how to use so-called "big data" for prediction. Some research teams have explored using Twitter or Google keyword volumes to predict stock market changes; Google Flu Trends
uses similar data to predict where a viral outbreak might occur. For ...
