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...