A news mapping service by Akamai Technologies promises to give unprecedented insight into the relative hunger that millions of Internet users have to learn of breaking events minute-by-minute.
The Akamai Net News Index provides a map of six global regions and measures the current appetite for news relative to average daily demand in terms of millions of visitors to news sites per minute, per week, within each geographic region. Spikes in traffic can reveal the next wave of news demand.
When news breaks, studies show that the Internet is displacing television and print media for instant information. The index could act act as early warning system on major news events, or for retrospective trend research later. Akamai Chief Executive Paul Sagan asks:
How do you measure an event of a certain magnitude? No one know what that means really. We are going to let people draw their own conclusions.
Mark
on Aug 25th, 2005
@ 0:11 am:
That sure is pretty cool.
But what I’d really like to know is what is really filtering through the blogosphere, right now. Not just big news websites. I want to know how much effect something I say in my blog can have. I want to see the ripples it causes.
I talked about getting Google Earth hooked up with Technorati here.