The MyBlogLog team are back at it again with the release of Topics. This was the last thing I worked on when I was finishing up and it’s great to see a vision realized. As their blog post says, there are almost 650,000 MBL members interacting with the social web and as each person clicks, favs, diggs, etc they are leaving bits and pieces of their intention all across the web.
When we first started to look at the data that was coming through everyone’s aggregated lifestreams, we remained true to the principle that we would not try and archive everything coming through. We wanted to be part of the messaging bus but the sheer cost of trying to archive all this information and try and organize it was something best left to the big search engines.
We did recognize the value of the data and the idea was that we would strip off the meta-data and original links and use the meta-data in interesting ways and point back to the original source. Topics is just that, a first instance, I believe, of something they are calling social analytics. A moving chart showing the “most interesting” phrases being linked to, shared, and discussed among the MyBlogLog community.
The chart above is from today, it shows today’s top topics with Bettie Page (RIP), and WordPress 2.7 topping the charts. You can scroll back into the past to see how these terms fared in the past (curious to see a little blip from Bettie Page back on 11/19 – wonder what that was about?). Then there’s a link to previous days so you can go back and see what was hot yesterday and the respecting histories of those phrases.
There’s a lot of thinking that went into what looks pretty simple. Not only is there a lot of crunching going on to process every tweet, blog post, photo, delicious link, etc that runs through the system, there’s also some text abstraction to make a jumble of words clump together (color = colour, etc).
For those that grumble that MyBlogLog never sends them any traffic, there’s something for you too. Down below each day’s chart is a list of the top headlines around each topic. Remember, these are MyBlogLog members’ so it’s nice and open where anyone really has a shot to get ahead of the news and write something authoritative.
Keep rockin’ it MyBlogLog!
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