foomandoonian

The Guardian has just launched Zeitgeist, a prototype index that displays visually what stories on the site are currently getting the most buzz. The blog post announcing it has some interesting explanations of the mechanics behind it:

To start with we wanted to look at how people use the site. A very blunt way to do this is page views, which has its place but isn’t that helpful in this context.

Instead we’re analysing and combining all sorts of things; where people come from, where they go to next, how long they stay on a particular page, if the page is getting passed round twitter and other social websites, number (and rate) of comments and so on.

They’ve done a smart think by keeping archive versions of these pages, not only because they could be interesting to browse in the future, but from an SEO perspective too.I think something similar to this would make for a far more compelling front page, instead of the mile long link-lists news sites seem to favour.

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