Zeitgeist screenshot
We've just launched an exciting new project which, as you can see from the screenshot above, looks (and behaves) a bit differently from most other things on the Guardian site.
Zeitgeist is a visual record of what people are currently finding interesting on guardian.co.uk at the moment. While other bits of the site are curated by editors (like the front page, or individual sections) or metadata (like blogs, which display in reverse-chronological order), Zeitgeist is dynamic, powered by the attention of users, which is why we've put this into the Community section.
The combination of content objects changes throughout the day, sometimes by the minute, as activity shifts around the site, stories get linked to or talked about, new stories are published and become widely-read and so on. You can also explore what was attracting attention on a given day in history (2010 only, for the time being) via the "previous" and "next" navigation links.
As well as being a different way to display and explore content, it's also a bit of an experiment. It's not finished yet, and indeed may never be totally finished, but will continue to evolve and change over coming days, weeks, months ... and beyond. What you see today is functional, but be warned: it may break now and then, or look odd in various browsers as we continue to tweak and modify the code and design. We wanted to get it out there and live so you can see a bit of what we're up to and offer advice, feedback and comments (constructive please).
To make it easy to see what's hot at a glance, we've colour-coded each content block in line with the section it belongs to on the site (these are the same colours used in the navigation bar at the top of each page). A side-effect of using section colours is that you can see sections ebb and flow throughout the week. In the course of building this app, we've noticed that it looks like more "News" articles become prominent on Mondays, while more "Lifestyle" articles get attention at the weekend. But humans are very good to spotting/inventing patterns where there are none: maybe over time there'll be enough data to analyse it properly.
We hope that this makes for an interesting alternative springboard into the content on this site, and those who have been playing with it behind the scenes can confirm that it's a great starting point when you've got a few minutes spare and just want something to read but you're not sure where to start.
So how does a story end up in the Zeitgeist? Time, as the shampoo adverts say, for the science bit.
Zeitgeist design specifications
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.
We're taking a range of these variables - enough that a single datapoint doesn't skew the results - and mushing (that's the technical term) them all together to get a value of "Zeitgeistiness" (another technical term) for each content object.
But - and this is the important bit - each content object only gets compared to other items in the same section, which in real terms means that Football articles only get compared to other Football articles, Technology blogposts against other Technology blogposts and so on. In fact, we go one step further, and take the type of article and day of week into consideration: an Environment gallery on a Monday only gets compared to others of the same type/section also published on Mondays. Because we've been storing and analysing this data overnight for a while now, we've got a good baseline to work from.
So when something appears on the Zeitgeist page, it's because it performed better (got more attention) than the norm for that content type/section/day. This makes Zeitgeist significantly different from "most read" and "most commented on" lists which appear on this site and others, which often contain a particular columnist or section which routinely gets more attention than other sections.
For example, Charlie Brooker (who regularly gets lots of attention on and off our site in the form of comments, visits and references/links all over the social web whenever he writes something for The Guardian) will only appear in Zeitgest when a particular column is being significantly more Zeitgeisty than usual.
Sometimes the items shown on the Zeitgeist page move around quite a bit, other-times they seem quite steady with one story taking up the main slot for the whole day. At around midnight the Zeitgeistiness for the whole day is calculated, with the most attention-attracting stories of the day frozen in time and placed into the archive.
More news will emerge in time as we continue developing and tweaking. In the meantime, why not take a quick peek, come back a few times during the day, maybe use it to dive into the site for a while and let us know what you think - and how you'd like to see it evolve - in the comments.
Update: Friday 5 February (am)
Thanks for all the comments and feedback below and on Twitter/other blogs. Lots to chew over.
A few people have been asking where we get the various metrics which make up the Zeitgeist algorithm. In the post above, we've highlighted some of the kinds of metrics, but in terms of sources, there are three main ones:
1. Visits, bounce rate, dwell, search terms and so on are provided by querying our site traffic metrics
2. "Social signals" (mentions on Twitter, etc.) come from site-specific search results powered by OneRiot's nifty API
3. Number, recency and rate of comments on content objects are calculated from the commenting platform used across guardian.co.uk
Some people have also asked about the name Zeitgeist and wondered why we're using it. Zeitgeist is a German word which means "spirit of the times" and is commonly used to capture the cultural/intellectual mood and interests or sociocultural direction of a particular nation or group of people at a particular time - in our case, Guardian readers and site users.
We haven't created Zeitgeist to replace the front page, or more traditional navigation on the site (which some people seem to have assumed), but rather as an alternative filter, for those who occasionally want to explore what others have been finding interesting recently. It's a mirror of attention, not an active promotion of particular kinds of content. As such, the contents will vary in tone, section and reason for inclusion.
As we said in the blogpost above, this is a work in progress and will continue to develop and change. In fact, we're doing a bit of tinkering with the algorithm (and the design) today, so do keep checking the Zeitgeist page for updates and changes.
Another update: Friday 5 February (pm)
Quite a few people have noted that some of the section colours can be difficult to read. In fact, the section colours are already in use throughout the site as headers and in the navigation, for example, but presented as solid blocks here, which means that if certain combinations of sections appear in zeitgeist the visual impact can be a little jarring.
Since we unveiled the current "design", we've heard people refer to the news disco, Elmer the elephant and Piet Mondriaan.
Some people seem to love the colours, others not so much. So in response to these comments, we've just made it possible to see the Zeitgeist blocks in high contrast, if you so desire.
Zeitgeist is now available in high contrast
To switch on this view, just click the little "high contrast" link (next to the previous/next navigation links).
In high contrast view, the blocks appear in shades of grey, which correspond to sections, though we've now added the section names to the blocks to make it even easier to recognise the source.
We haven't made the images black and white - there's only one image included in the high contrast version - but do let us know what you think: does this make it easier to read, if you were concerned about colour?
Please bear in mind that this isn't a final design, as we said in the original post - we're going to keep changing and tweaking it in line with your feedback and other things we're already working on.
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