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Internet Solutionswww.codesyntax.com

Niagarank

Azitain Poligonoa 3 - KE-20600 EIBAR

Tel: ++34 943 821 780Fax: ++34 943 820 669

Master in Digital Jorunalism, IE, Madrid, 2013.01.29

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Introducing Niagarank

I am Luistxo Fernandez, journalist in another life

Work at CodeSyntax, small and peripheral web development company, based in the Basque Country

And we launched Niagarank.es on Jan. 7th

This presentation, sites mentioned, and references at:

Delicious.com/luistxo/mdj

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Introducing Niagarank

New newssite:

Niagara + Rank

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

What

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

What do we do

We follow several thousand Twitter users

We rank users, and we rank the news items that those users tweet

The algorithm publishes the most interesting stuff

That process, in 40 subjects, 40 interest channels

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

ExampleOne of 40 channels: Política

7 days of data. Last week.

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Curation

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Curation

Users detected 12537

Ranked 7213

Followed 5000

Tweets received 887201

Analysed 477271

Original tweets with URLs 97759

Distinct URLs 41603

Published URLs 45

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Curation

In 'Politics', we distill 900k tweets, to produce 45 news items

That, x40 times

The backend machine, Robsoc: Robotic Social Curation

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Curation

Mass-curation: Digg, Meneame.net, Reddit

Entourage curation: The #discover tab of Twitter, Paper.li, Flipboard, main stream at Facebook

Niagarank is mass-curation, but 'involuntary', and overcomes the main problems of 'entourage curation':

– Building a entourage focused on a subject takes time

– Everyone's entourage is varied

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Origin

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Origin of Niagarank

Umap

A detector of all tweets in Basque

Nov. 2010. Detected all users, and filtered their tweets by language.

It worked while we were few... Then it crashed.

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Opportunity from failure

1. Need a system to detect the most interesting Basque Twitter users --> Rank

2. Having watched its functioning, a lesson:

- Trending topics not so interesting

- URLs in half of the tweets, information exchange is the key insight we could extract

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Opportunity from failure: automated news system in Basque

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

References

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

References

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Business

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Business plan

Low cost version of Blogging Networks, both b2c and b2b

B2c:

Make Niagarank a news destination

Adsense. Sponsorship. Affiliates (we want to try with books).

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Business plan

Low cost version of Blogging Networks, both b2c and b2b

b2b prototypes:

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Business plan: tailored services

Tailored content for news organisations (NewsCred model)

Mass-curation for organisations

Extracting collective intelligence in the social media

Press clippings, social media alerts, damage control, issue monitoring, reaching out to influencers...

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Business plan: the rank

Use the rank for business? The Klout model?

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Business plan: the rank

Use the rank for business? The Klout model?

For now, let's use the rank

to get meaningful content

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Business plan: being frugal

Max. automation and incremental impact of small improvements. Scalability.

Replace journalists by robots... also by editors. As opposed to new Spanish initiatives like Gonzoo, ZoomNews, InfoLibre, no pressroom staff to (under)pay.

No pressure, no investors, web development business doing well at CodeSyntax

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Roadmap

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

The roadmap

Improve, improve, improve

Reach out to Facebook, Google+, Google Currents

Deploy more countries

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

Questions

Niagarank IE – MDJ2013.01

thanks

Luistxo Fernandez - LFernandez@codesyntax.com

@luistxo - http://www.codesyntax.com