Daypop Adds Word Bursts to Their Toolset
Over the weekend, Daypop announced that it had implemented a word burst reporting tool. According to the announcement that Dan Chan made on his weblog:
Shortly after putting up the Top 40, I realized there were plenty of memes that make the rounds that weren't accompanied by links. Either the meme was a topic of conversation that had no link, or it was a meme that had no single, authoritative link. Catching heightened word usage is a natural extension to the Top 40.I kept the idea on the back burner until very recently, when I realized Joe Millionaire was the buzz, but there were no authoritative links to anchor the meme. There was the one link to the Joe Millionaire site but few bloggers linked to it when writing about the show....
Chan goes on to say that he heard about word burst research done at Cornell and published in New Scientist, that this brought it altogether for him, and as a result he produced the Daypop Word Bursts function.
It's amazing that Daypop produced this function so quickly. But they had the infrastructure to do it quickly, took a shot at it, and will undoubtedly improve it.
Dave Aiello wrote, "FWIW, Dave Winer pointed Daypop word bursts out on Scripting News a few minutes before I began writing this story. Thanks for jogging my memory."