TailRank, Spinn3r, TechMeme and TechCrunch: New Attention

Kevin has released new versions of TailRank (2.5) and Spinn3r (2.0). A new version of TailRank mean a new dose of Arrington's criticism. What is going on here is the use of one piece of technology (TechMeme) to make assumptions and criticize another (TailRank). Michael Arrington compares TailRank with TechMeme in the following way:

• Assume that they are trying to do the same thing (surface news that is hot right this minute)
• Assume that they are using the same algorithm to compute this
• Compare the performance of the back end (grabbing data from the blogosphere in real time)

Ok - now I'm making assumptions, but my point is that TailRank - while it is obviously doing something similar to TechMeme - is not TechMeme. Look at the name: TailRank - it is ranking articles based on the attention given to them by the long tail. Much of this attention is due to interest sparked by the cycles that happen in the blogosphere and how things are passed along (compare this with TechMeme's approach which is based more on immediacy and weights given to 'important' blogs).

To Michael's criticism that the news is old, Kevin points out that if attention is being given to any news, what matters is that that attention is being given right now, not what the date of the news is. For example, if the blogosphere suddenly linked to an archived story about the launch of Sputnik, that would be old news but new attention.

I actually wrote about this issue along time ago when TechMeme initially appeared with features similar to (but different, of course) those we had developed on BlogPulse.

Comments

[Kevin Burton]

Hey.....

Another point that I wanted to mention (which is specific to your readers).

We're making Spinn3r 100% free for researchers.

If you're getting your PhD and need blog data we can totally hook you up :)

Kevin

[Matthew Hurst]

Kevin,

Thanks for the reminder. I was actually holding back on this as I wanted to do a longer post after speaking with you about more of the details. Let's try to do that next week.

[Conrad Lee]

Has any academic researcher actually gotten free access to Spinn3r?

Kevin has posted in a few places that this data is free for PhD students like myself.

However, I've had trouble getting access. I have found one specific dataset that was made available for ICWSM 2009 (International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media), but I would actually like access to the Spinn3r API so that I could get fresh data as well. I have twice requested access on the spinn3r website's contact form, but now months have passed and I am still waiting for a reply.

Did enthusiasm at Spinn3r for making this data available to PhD students just die out? I'm willing to give the Spinn3r guys the benefit of the doubt and just assume that they're too distracted with other matters, but it's a real shame because this would be a great dataset for research.