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TechWatching Update… new & improved

Some exciting news tonite! Well, exciting for me anyway. My TechMeme alternative and Tailrank-competitor TechWatching now offers vastly improved “conceptual clustering.”

Previously, the homepage organized “hot topics” into keyword clusters, based on the relative prevalence of a given keyword within a pool of content from a certain time period. So, for example, “Google” would be associated with “wireless,” “spectrum,” “auction,” “reader,” and “street.” That’s where it stopped, however, not taking into account that wireless/spectrum/auction all referred to the same topic. The result was that “reader” and “street” were crowded out of the “Hot Topics” area by three similar tags about the upcoming wireless spectrum auction - which left some interesting Google-related news out of sight.

Now, that second layer of clustering is in effect, grouping together wireless/spectrum/auction under “spectrum,” which was the most “powerful” keyword in the concept cluster based on observed volume. That leaves room for “reader” and “street” and lets you know about updates to Google’s RSS-reader and street-level views - hurray! The “other” conceptual group member tags - i.e.: wireless and spectrum, now provide alternative views of the same story cluster, available via an “Also See” link.

Anyway, it all sounds sort of complex: but the upshot, hopefully, is simplicity for TechWatching readers. Have a look below, or check it out for real:

On a side note, a few short weeks ago, I knew nothing about algorithms and content analysis - not to say that I know much now, but I’m certainly having fun figuring it out.

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