Forgot one “where in the world” item for us — next weekend, February 21st and 22nd, Ilya, Carol, and Melle will be at PodCamp Toronto. Be sure to say hello!
From 1:15-1:45pm on Saturday, Ilya will be presenting: Leveraging Social Media, Case Study: one post and 250,000 visitors later”.
Good news!
We have fixed:
a) postrank.com running slowly
b) delays/slowness in adding new feeds to the system, and
c) feed added notifications not being sent.
It will mean a few folks who’ve added a bunch of feeds to our system will get a batch of notifications — sorry about that.
Of course, if you observe any additional quirks and such, please let us know.
Not so long ago when someone mentioned ‘web’ we immediately thought about the technical infrastructure underlying the concept: the routers, the providers, speed of access. And now a few years later, once the infrastructure has become a commodity, the meaning has shifted: when we say web, we usually mean the ‘Social Web‘. The focus is now on the people, and technology has become an enabling piece: wikis, blogs, micro publishing, photo sites, user generated video, and the list goes on.
To put things into perspective, it helps to compare the numbers of a vanguard ‘traditional media’ powerhouse such as Thomson Reuters in 2008 to our new ‘Social Web’:
|
Thomson Reuters (“Traditional Media” ) |
User Generated Content |
|
3 million news messages / year |
1+ million blog posts / day |
|
730,000 alerts / year |
2+ million messages on Twitter / day |
|
515,000 photos / year |
10+ million new photos on Facebook / day |
|
54,000 video stories / year |
8,000 new videos on YouTube / day |
Thomson Reuters alone managed to produce roughly 350 new news messages / hour – try keeping up with that! However, this number pales in comparison to the 1 million new blog posts each day. Times have definitely changed.
The sheer amount of information and the surrounding activity means that the role of traditional media has changed dramatically: journalists are no longer the first to bring us information on breaking news. Instead, their role is shifting to that of post-analysis of the vast amount of content generated by both the amateurs and professionals on the scene.
Wikipedia is the new information clearinghouse for developing news (a wiki page was created within 5 minutes of first news of the Mumbai attacks in 2008, and over 2,500 updates have been made since). Red Cross is using Twitter to communicate emergency news, share safety tips - all in real time. Flickr, PhotoBucket, TwitPic and Facebook offer real-time photo streams of the developing events. And thousands of blogs are created every day to provide conduits for aggregating content and self expression. While traditional media was banned from covering the Thailand coup in 2006, hundreds of citizen blogs were created with live updates, photos and commentary.
The amount of and speed at which new information is being produced on a daily basis also means that we need new tools to manage our workflows. As highlighted by Marshall Kirkpatrick, basking in the social media noise offers many great opportunities for serendipity, growth, and discovery, but it can also be quite overwhelming.
Interestingly enough, part of the solution to this problem also lies in the same data stream: information filtering is becoming increasingly social. More and more, we find our news and discover new content through friends and professional and special interest networks, which in turn means more sharing, more comments, and more user engagement. This information cascades from network to network and person to person on a daily basis – a pattern that we observe daily at AideRSS via our engagement analytics.
Monitoring this activity is a non-trivial task, but it yields a lot of really interesting data. For example, did you know that there does appear to be an optimal publishing time for your blog post? Our recent announcement of real-time analytics opens a whole new set of opportunities for analytics purposes, quick demos of which I’ll be sharing over the course of the next several weeks.
For example, what has been your experience with engagement cascades, have you ever analyzed or optimized for them? Next up, we’ll dissect a hands-on example.
Steven will be speaking at Scotland on Rails in Edinburgh, March 26-28.
He’ll be presenting on Avoiding the Big Rewrite: Developing Maintainable Software on Saturday the 28th.
Delivering real-time social media analytics is one of the core infrastructure and technological pieces of our platform at AideRSS. We’re happy to announce that earlier this week we successfully migrated our systems to deliver exactly that: real-time monitoring of the most popular social media sites and platforms. (Press release.)
This means immediate feedback for PostRank scores as users are engaging with publishers’ content (faster and better discovery) and an immediate feedback loop for the publishers (to help them engage in new and ongoing conversations).
As part of the upgrade, we have also added a number of new sources to our platform:
Among the new additions are: Diigo, Feecle, Furl, Identica, Jaiku, BrightKite and MéxicoDiario. And of course, we are always working on adding new sites and improving our global coverage.
Over the course of past five years, online social networks, and a proliferation of socially-oriented tools such as wikis, blogs, microblogging, bookmarking and sharing sites, have transformed the Web from a technical infrastructure to a social platform, which is now often referred to as the Social Web.
Vik Singh, architect of the Yahoo! Search BOSS team, recently highlighted some of the challenges and opportunities that this change has brought forward:
One emerging area of search that I think no one has really solved is real-time authoritative search. When breaking news happens (like the Mumbai bombing, Hudson River plane crash, or wildfires), it’s difficult for traditional news sources to discover and prioritize all the information in a timely fashion. It can take several minutes or hours for traditional media to converge on the important stories. However, new social media outlets like Twitter are breaking these important stories faster than traditional media. By looking at the number of users chatting about these topics, one can measure the future newsworthiness of a very fresh story despite its potentially minimal traditional news coverage at that moment.
Later in his Q&A, Vik also highlights PostRank as a potential and promising solution to the problem he outlines. The combination of real-time social media monitoring and PostRank analysis provides a great a signal for the new and upcoming stories as they develop. Want to give it a try? Try our BOSS+PostRank mashup:
To get started simply type in a query (e.g. yahoo), select news, and click search. To power the search, we use the BOSS Mashup framework to retrieve the latest stories from around the web, and then apply a PostRank filter on top – stories with the highest engagement have the highest scores and are displayed first in the list. You can preview the story, click on the PostRank score to view some of the metrics behind it, and even see the filtered out stories at the bottom of the page:
The combination of BOSS and PostRank APIs is a great demonstration of leveraging the data generated in the Social Web. Give it a try (boss.postrank.com), and let us know on your thoughts and suggestions.
