What Are You Talking About? (WiR) Published 2008-06-25 under week+in+review

This Week in Review posting focuses on a couple of sites that help us keep track of what's going on in news and the blogisphere - what are you talking about?

As you can see, I have decided to change the name of Week in Review (WiR) postings. This was done, first to better reflect a theme for the week but also becase "Week in Review" is boring. It does not attack any attention. And it is not interesting in a RSS feed. So, without further ado, let's talk a look at what you are talking about.

Twitturly

Twitturly is a site that shows what URLs people are talking about as they tweet on Twitter. As you can imagine, there are lot of Twitter conversations on videos. The recent "Ball Girl Makes Incredible Catch" was included in 42 tweets. (If you have not seen the catch, it is quite incredible!). And "Lady Spinning on an Escalator" was mentioned 28 times. (Again, worth watching - I could see using this video in class.)

Twitturly also breaks the stats down by time including how many "active" tweets the URL is mentioned on. An "active" tweet is one posted in the last 24 hrs. It also approximates how many people have seen the URL via Twitter. This is based on the number of people following a Twitter member who tweets the URL.

The real beauty of Twitturly is discovery... the ability to find things that you never knew you really need. For example, you should check out this wired.com how-to wiki page.

Daylife

Daylife gathers news from thousands of news sources across the world and organizes it into related stories, quotes and images. If you check out their site, you will see that you can the latest hot topics, top photos starred by Daylife users, as well as the latest news stories. You can search for news articles based on a topic. Results are not limited to just the stories. You can see images or quotes based on a topic. You can also see related topics.

For this alone, Daylife is an interesting resource. But what makes the service so unique and exciting is its eagerness to open its data to developers in an effort to create new innovative services. Daylife is currently running the Daylife Developer Challenge encouraging developers to create exciting new applications. The term that they use is "newsware". Kinda Cool!

There are a number of sites that have already created newsware apps. A couple worth checking out include:

• The Washington Post's Issue Tracker lets you see news and opinions on the presidential candidates and the major issues of the 2008 campaign.
• Universe, a Daylife powered creation by the incredibly talented artist/technologist Jonathan Harris. Check out his session at TED.
• [editors node: this last app does not appear to be still active but is a very interesting idea] CNN's Meme-o-meter ranks the hottest memes being discussed in news stories and blogs. Clicking on a meme will display the latest news for that idea/concept.

Tech Tags: digiwalks week-in-review trends daylife twitter news