Blog: Graphs

Hot Tags and the Tags Related to Them

Think about the news you track and the issues you need to stay on top of on a daily basis. For me, one of those topics is social networking. There are often thousands of stories about social networking published every day with perhaps hundreds of different angles to them. Maybe somewhere in those thousands of stories and hundreds of angles is an emerging trend – major research on its impact on job hunting, a new technology or service that the blogosphere is drumming up, or the use of these networks by a new segment of the population. But how can I spot the trends in all that news?

Well, graphing the news can help. When you look at the incidence of a word in the news and can see the rise and fall of its use on a day-to-day basis, you can tell if a subject is gaining momentum in the media. However, seeing the rise and fall of a word’s incidence does nothing to help determine why it’s getting more or less attention. To figure that out you need more information. One way to do this is to look at words related to the hot topics in the media.

This graph shows the mentions of MySpace in the media from July 8 to July 30 (data from Trendio.com*). You can see that there is a slight spike toward the end of the chart and that mentions for MySpace peak at 164 on July 27. But why? 

Tools That Show What's Happening in a Glance

One of the features that sets the Managing News system apart from other aggregators is that it makes it easy to act on information. It does this by showing you the big picture of what’s going on within the system over different timeframes.

The latest graph we plan to integrate into Managing News is a line graph that will show the terms (with the highest and lowest rate of change) that have risen or fallen fastest over a period of time. This will quickly show you the newest hot topics and what is already old news. A big benefit of this graph is that it will cut out issues that are always talked about in your field.

This is a test of a way to see where our users of the blog are coming from. This is free... I guess we will see if it really begins tomorrow. For more information go to http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/hitmaps/ Where are visitors to this page?