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JetStream is one of the projects currently in our labs. It monitors the CNET 100 Top Blogs OPML file (but it could be any OPML), indexing all of the RSS or Atom feeds. These feeds are checked on a regular basis, whereby we index blog posts and articles by their tags and categories. From there we update a daily tag cloud, tag calendar, tag constellation, and multiple tag profiles that show you the hot topics across the A-List
More on how it works, after the jump…
Normal tag clouds show you what’s popular for all time, which don’t account for “relevance decay.” JetStream looks at posts from a daily perspective so you can see what is important today. (Or what was important yesterday.) We even have a Google Widget for putting today’s tag cloud on your Google homepage.
The Tag Constellation is another experiment to discover related content by how various sites are combining and using the same tags. Think of it as “Six degrees for tagging Kevin Bacon.”
Clicking a tag in the cloud, calendar, or constellation leads you to a Tag Profile (like this one). The profile shows you what posts have been made with that tag today, how much the posts are talked about in the blogosphere, and how much that tag has been used in the last week. You can also get an RSS feed for all JetStreamed posts which use that tag.
We just spun up a JetStream Discussion Group to talk about ideas, feature requests, etc., so feel free to drop in and join the conversation.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Joseph A di Paolantonio // Feb 9, 2007 at 10:32 am
Are you using the open source ETL tool, Jetstream, in someway to gather your feeds & tag cloud data? Or is this just a coincidence of names?
https://sourceforge.net/projects/jetstream
2 Mark Woodman // Feb 12, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Pure coincidence. The idea behind the name of Jetstream was “clouds moved by whichever way the A-List winds are blowing.”
JetStream is using some custom OPML parsing in PHP, then using SimplePie to grab feeds and extract category/tag data, then storing it in MySQL.
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