How Niagarank.es works. A news aggretation site curated by robots and based on Twitter realtime news detection. Presentation for the Master in Digital Journalism at IE, Madrid. Jan 2013

1. Niagarank
Master in Digital Journalism, IE, Madrid, 2013.01.29
Internet Solutions
Azitain Pol 3K
E-20600 EIBAR www.codesyntax.com 1
Tel. (+34) 943821780

2. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
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

3. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
Introducing Niagarank
New newssite:
Niagara + Rank

4. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
What

5. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
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

6. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
Example
One of 40 channels: Política
7 days of data. Last week.

10. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
Curation

11. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
Curation
Users detected 12537
Ranked 7213
Followed 5000
Tweets received 887201
Analysed 477271
Original tweets with URLs 97759
Distinct URLs 41603
Published URLs 45

12. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
Curation
In 'Politics', we distill 900k tweets, to produce 45 news
items
That, x40 times
The backend machine, Robsoc: Robotic Social Curation

13. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
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

14. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
Origin

15. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
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.

16. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
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

17. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
Opportunity from failure:
automated news system in Basque

18. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
References

19. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
References

20. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
Business

21. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
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).

22. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
Business plan
Low cost version of Blogging Networks, both b2c and b2b
b2b prototypes:

23. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
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...

24. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
Business plan: the rank
Use the rank for business? The Klout model?

25. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
Business plan: the rank
Use the rank for business? The Klout model?
For now, let's use the rank
to get meaningful content

26. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
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

27. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
Roadmap

28. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
The roadmap
Improve, improve, improve
Reach out to Facebook, Google+, Google Currents
Deploy more countries

29. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
Questions

30. Niagarank
IE – MDJ
2013.01
thanks
Luistxo Fernandez - LFernandez@codesyntax.com
@luistxo - http://www.codesyntax.com