[wordup] Current Events in the "Blogverse"

[Adam Shand]

This is *amazing*.  This is the kind of thing that I imagined would be 
common on the internet when I first got involved all those years ago.

Adam.

Via: http://boingboing.net/#200022652
From: http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000251.html

Technorati's Current Events Technorati's got a new feature called 
Current Events that I just whipped up.  It is a list of the top links to 
"professional" news sites by bloggers in the last two hours, along with 
comments and analysis.  I created it because, like most people, I've 
been following the progress of the war, watching and reading the mass 
media, and I wanted to know what people out there were saying about the 
news. What are the most important stories?  What is real, and what is 
propaganda?  What is not being reported, or is being underreported? 
These were the questions on my mind when I created Technorati's Current 
Events.  Ever since the Google purchase of Blogger, the thing that 
struck me as the most compelling potential new feature was the 
combination of Google News with Blogger users' commentary.  Perhaps 
they'll still do it, but I think I just beat them to it.

I'm constantly amazed by the collective wisdom of a huge number of 
individuals, each publishing their thoughts, and voting their attention 
by linking to things.  I wanted to tap into this collective brainpower, 
organize it, and present it back to us all.

Here's how it works:  Since Technorati is already keeping track of 
150,000 blogs every hour (wow, we hit 150k today!), I tuned the engine 
to spot trends in recent events by only looking at blog posts in the 
previous two hours.  This helps to increase churn on the page, as only 
articles and links that are immediately relevant will stay on top of the 
Current Events page.  By the way, I'm not sure that two hours is the 
best balance of immediacy versus trivia, so I expect that I'll play 
around with it a bit as I have time, perhaps over the weekend, to tweak 
the settings to get things just right.  The good news is that as more 
people take up blogging, the results should get better and better even 
as they get fresher and fresher.  The page data is refreshed every 15 
minutes, so one eigth of the links are always new, and one eigth are 
removed. The number in parentheses net to each result is the number of 
new links to that article in the previous two hours. Clicking on the 
(Cosmos) link shows you all of the bloggers who have linked to that 
article since it was published. And underneath each article is a set of 
short descriptions or context, written by bloggers in the past two hours.

Would you kind readers be interested in seeing different views into the 
current events page?  I could create one that allowed links over the 
last 12 hours, or the last 24 hours - but too much more history and the 
page will start to look the same as Blogdex or Daypop.   Or would you be 
interested in following other kinds of news?  I've been thinking of 
implementing a categorization system, so people interested in sports can 
see results filtered towards those results, for example.  Also, I've 
been thinking about the non-English-speaking bloggers out there, seen 
most often in the Interesting Newcomers list.  Would you be interested 
in seeing a set of language-specific Technorati lists?

Let me know your feedback.  I don't think that I'll have the time to 
implement anything soon, as I have a bunch of other very very 
interesting projects that are taking up the large majority of my time, 
and, as work projects, frankly demand a higher priority than Technorati 
and blogging.  I'll still get in a few late night and weekend hacks on 
Technorati, but don't be surprised if you don't hear from me very much 
for the next month or so...

Posted by dsifry at March 21, 2003 12:43 AM