News about us is slowly spreading around the Intertubes;
Also, like, totally check out our FestBuzz blog, for some reason it’s not getting much traffic (I need to promote it more on the Festbuzz.com homepage, for one) and there’s some awesome reviews starting to get posted on there by my citizen journo elite squad.
There’s a really fascinating post over at TechCrunch today by Mary Hodder, someone who’s been working in ‘live search’ – what we now call the real-time web – for some time.
The article’s definitely worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to highlight some of the difficulties with real-time conversations that she mentions. A great example is the Michael Jackson Tweet-splosion; if you’re taking a purely search-based view, what do you search for? “MJ”? “Michael”? “King of Pop”? As Mary says, that’s a relatively easy example!
More interestingly is the comments Mary makes about authority. How do you measure authority online? Well, as part of my initial PhD research I looked at various web-structure algorithms (yes, including PageRank) and how you might exploit them along with semantic information to gain a true understanding of the importance of an article.
This research is rooted in scientific publications, in fact; we can learn a lot from the relatively ‘clean’ case of scientific paper citations, although the language used on the web is about a thousand times more interesting. (And, thus, a thousand times harder to process.)
If I told you how we actually track influence, of course, I’d have to kill you. But check out Mary’s article, it’s great food for thought.
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