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…
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Dave,
It looks really cool in concept, but the design needs a little work. The type on the Current Events page is tiny, too small for me to read with Win2K IE 5.5.
I wondere why I always stumble across your stuff late at night when you have just posted it. Sorry to have the first comment be a bug. I really like the idea.
OK, I’m not the world’s best HTML or CSS designer, I tent to steal from people I respect. Of course, I always end up taking a good design and srewing something up with it. Try the Current Events link now with IE – I think I fixed the CSS so that it will display and look OK.
Dave
Very useful service David!
I am posting about it at eCuaderno:
http://orihuela.blogspot.com/2003_03_01_orihuela_archive.html#200021871
All the best,
Jose Luis
It’s bigger, but I am one of those old folks who can’t read 8 or 9 point type onscreen. I can make it out, but I can’t read it, if you know what I mean. Plus you have it specified absolutely, which means that IE won’t let me increase the type size on my end. I could switch to Mozilla or Opera, but I have too many tools which depend on the hated MS IE.
Anyway, tastes differ. Other people may not have the same problems with it. Certainly I have seen lots of developers working with screen resolutions pumped way up, and tiny fonts, just so that they could get more code on a screen.
Could you add an RSS feed before you focus on real work?
Very nice. Any chance you can add a feature that will give some distinction to international covarge such as British, German, Spanish, french, etc. of the latest news? Would be great help.
Thanks.
Thanks David, great stuff, and I’ve been spending time here over the last few days. One thing I’ve been looking for is similar to Google News’ “Sort by Date” within a cluster… I’m trying to find the most recent breaking news which has attracted notice.
Could there be a view into the database which puts the newest referenced addresses (of a minimum popularity) at the top, rather than the most popular recent references to those addresses at the top? The current view seems to successfully show very recent popularity, which is useful for judging overall opinion, but could it also be used to efficiently discover the most recent popular news as well…?
(With the clusters at Google News I have to first navigate to a cluster and then sort-by-date to find new news within that cluster. If we can use the distributed judgment to discover significant new articles across clusters — sorting by timeliness of minimally-referenced addresses rather than by popularity of timely references to addresses of unknown timeliness — then that could be very useful for things I’m trying to learn.)
Regardless, thanks for this… fascinating work!
In Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, the Stephen Maturin character often remarks to the effect of “I’ve never known a village’s judgement to be wrong.” He was speaking of close ship’s companies, and here we are all trying to track a remarkably diffuse community, of course, but there are clusters of closeness and community that direct some of the larger trends, along with the statistical phenomena of a large enough sample and the weather-like trails of events passing through our I/O buffers.
Any chance of seeing an RSS feed of this data? or is it there, and I’m just missing it.
You wil notice that I do not even know what url stands for : Am that much of a tyro .
What I WAS drawn toward Blogdom by is the idea of your Commentary ….not the usual rehash of the usual news sources..: Navigating this site did NOT reveal what I needed ( wanted and/or expected . HELP ! Is it there ? !
I have the uttermost contempt for such a great many of the current “news” reporters , that good ,inciteful ( and critical ) commentary would sure be welcome……
David
Whenever I come to links at Technorati , I squint and look closely to see if I recognize any of the bloggers.
It appears that this weekend (15/16 November) Technorati’s Current Events is shelfless.
Real Pitty…
Jozef
Any news on the RSS/XML front yet?
Any news on the RSS/XML front yet?