ResourceBlog Article: Cool! A New Prototype from the Beeb: BBC Zeitgeist, Most Shared BBC Web Pages on Twitter

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Thursday, 15th July 2010

Cool! A New Prototype from the Beeb: BBC Zeitgeist, Most Shared BBC Web Pages on Twitter

From the BBC R&D Blog

Access Zeitgeist (Prototype) from the BBC

Note: Zeitgeist is available for a limited time according to the blog ppst.

Zeitgeist is a prototype to highlight the most shared BBC webpages on Twitter, a digest to link people to the hottest BBC pages. The project is part of a larger area of exploration to see how the BBC can use real-time trending data to enrich user experiences. One of our recent projects Music Trends [very cool] shows how the artists played on BBC radio are trending on other music services, such as Last.fm and We are Hunted.

We developed Zeitgeist as a simple information source for users and to provide insight into users' interests and behaviours for our production teams. There are some interesting commercial alternatives available such as backtweets, twitturls, twitturly and tweetmeme, which are worth checking out but we had some specific requirements for our prototype.

The system combines a custom built ingest chain using Twitter's public APIs to search for tweets containing a BBC URL. As it's running in real-time these links come and go depending on what Twitter users are talking about. You can see the 'liveness' in the Last 24 hours view or take a broader view of the Last 7 days.

More Facts:

+ The URL of the web page and associated metadata are used to autonomously assign the tweet a category

+ Links ranked by tweet count including retweets.

+ Entries include date/time first tweeted and first published. The blog post points out that it's not only new articles being tweeted.

+ Those inside the BBC see a different view of the data (screenshot in blog post)
They get to see hashtags, history, and keywords

+ "Gardenhose" (as opposed to "Firehose") is used. That provides about 100 tweets per second.

+ A chart showing how tweets are ingested into the system is provided

As a rough guide, the Zeitgeist ingest chain handles about 300,000 tweets an hour, of that 900 contain links, 500 of which link to the BBC. Finally, short lists work well as there's a steep drop-off of tweets lower down the chart and as you might expect the majority of links point to BBC News articles.

Access Zeitgeist (Prototype) from the BBC

Access the Complete Blog Post

Source: BBC R&D Blog

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