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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.
Comments
3 February 2010 8:29PM
Zeitgeistiness ?
Zeitgeisty ?
If you make such words I can call my mobile phone "Handy" too.
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Share3 February 2010 9:24PM
We like to see what we can sneak past the Sub-Editors.
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Share3 February 2010 9:25PM
Admittedly not showing the post to the Sub-Eds also helped.
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Share3 February 2010 10:04PM
Changing one number of the algorithm could change the whole Zeitgeist.
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Share4 February 2010 12:11AM
You could also do one on Comment is Free posters called Schadenfreude
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Share4 February 2010 10:56AM
Is that kittens I see as part of the formula? (in the zeitgeist design specification photo?)
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Share4 February 2010 11:04AM
IMHO: The idea is nice, the scoring clearly thought through, the presentation needs some work. Stories without images are a bit overpowering with the solid colour blocks. It's also quite difficult to scan as a grid, one direction should really be dominant, probably more vertical than horizontal.
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Share4 February 2010 11:43AM
Good - a bit like "The Wire/Radar" feature on Tumblr. Isn't there a danger that pages will become self-zeitgeisting (that's my new word) - i.e. when they get featured on Zeitgeist more people will click through to them and promote them futher through links, blogs and tweets? Or are click-throughs from Zeitgeist itself exempt from the Zeitgeist formula?
Looks pretty though. And interesting. And I bookmarked it instinctively - which is a good sign!
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Share4 February 2010 1:27PM
@Imhotepa
I think we're balancing the numbers enough that changing one of them wouldn't utterly change the outcome. We spent some time weighing different types of user engagement/interaction/use to get something that didn't swing around too wildly.
I don't think we're totally there yet, and there'll be more tweaking over the coming weeks/months, but this is why we threw it out there now to get some other eyes looking/clicking it.
@itapoa
Kittens is indeed a vital part of the process, as we tea which is sadly cropped off the bottom of the image.
@paulpod404
Hah, yeah, elsewhere on the internet it's already been called the News Disco. We didn't want to spend too long on the design (you can probably tell) otherwise we could have spent weeks getting it "just right", which is good in some cases, but we thought we'd just go with it here.
One of the other test layouts was vertical so we'll possibly give that a whirl for a few days too, to see what people think.
@theirdarkaddress
We're protected a bit from self-zeitgeisting (nice work btw!) at the moment due to the rest of the activity on the site being far greater than the traffic/influence here. If we replaced the whole front page with it, then yes there'd be some feedback, but again because the activity is also measured off-site (i.e. where else besides guardian.co.uk are the links/stories being passed round) that's dampened an amount.
If (or when) we start to roll elements of this out into the main site (we have thoughts about how this may work) then we'll need to take a closer look at that effect.
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Share4 February 2010 3:41PM
I like it. I've got two suggestions:
When I put my cursor over the story box, it would be nice if a short description scrolled down like on the frontpage of the main site.
The colour codes should be re-positioned to the side as I need to scroll down to see them.
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Share4 February 2010 3:51PM
I am a very visual person, and I love the way the front page is displayed now. I can spot things very quickly, in your new system I have to do alot of reading, which is tiring. For starters, I do not like it and hopefully it will not be forced upon us. It will be there for those who want to use it, and the rest of us can still have what there is now. Over and out.
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Share4 February 2010 3:52PM
Me likey.
I little more info on the subheadings might not go amis though.
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Share4 February 2010 3:54PM
I've set zeitgeist as my home page for a while, else I suspect I'll neglect to use it. Looks good though, potentially embeddable in other parts of the site (or even external sites).
One immediate thought was whether the colour-coding could run down the left or right side - it's easy to confuse some of those colours and having the key at the bottom means scrolling down and up.
Could sub-headings for the articles be incorporated into 'mouse-over' information? 'A healthy addiction' doesn't mean much so may not attract the number of readers that would follow if they knew it was about Facebook. (Particularly as it's in CiF blue, rather than Tech brown.) Come to think of it, there's loads you could include in a mouse-over bubble: author, section, publication date, last updated, number of comments...
I rarely follow a Twitter link described as 'Funny!', but if I knew it was a video of a baby panda sneezing... well that's a different matter.
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Share4 February 2010 3:54PM
For a really great example of how to use your design approach but also show more popular news items easily check out newsmap: http://newsmap.jp/
It aggregates all news from google news.
Take a look to get some ideas for evolving your Zeitgeist design and algorithms - to be clear I have no involvement with that developer. Just a very cool tool.
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Share4 February 2010 4:00PM
The colour coding is not very practical - you have to always refer to the colour key, which is an additional, unnecessary and irritating step. Instead of colours, try using some simple icons, or icons on a coloured background.
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Share4 February 2010 4:04PM
I really don't care "what people are currently finding interesting on guardian.co.uk at the moment".
Is there a reason why anyone who isn't either a sociologist, a Guardian employee, or a mindless sheep should?
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Share4 February 2010 4:07PM
Why don't you make the box size linked to the amount of interest the story generates, like those maps of the world where the size of the country is determined by the size of the population?
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Share4 February 2010 4:09PM
It's a nice idea but when you load the page, the rectangle isn't central (you have to scroll down): maybe you should ditch or minimize all the GU header stuff just for this page? Doesn't feel quite right somehow, mixing the standard page design and a new interface and form of interaction. Kind of halfway compromise.
Also maybe it could be more visually dynamic by having a kind of 'fading in' and 'fading out' zone for features/items that are increasing in attention/newer and others that are losing attention/older.
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Share4 February 2010 4:09PM
You might want to change 'Zeitgeist it our newest experiment in showing trending news, topics and articles from The Guardian.' to 'Zeitgeist is...'
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Share4 February 2010 4:12PM
I like it.
I'd never seen newsmap before - thanks Tailcast - but I think this seems a little clearer.
A short description would be good (when cursor is over a story).
Also, at the moment it does not fit in a single screen shot on my PC. I'd prefer if it removed the need for vertical scrolling - if the key and all info was on a single screen then i could glance at it periodically to get a 'snapshot' of the current zeitgeist but at the moment it doesn't give me that immediate view.
As for the colour key - it's the same as for the rest of the site - football is dark green and CiF is blue which takes care of most of my needs :-).
Nice idea - I hope it becomes a feature.
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Share4 February 2010 4:12PM
If you like 'Zeitgeist' (and if you don't) then you might like newsmap - http://newsmap.jp/ ... also see http://marumushi.com/projects/newsmap.
- newsmap is similar, but with time-redundancy of the story indicated though shading and it's coverage is global. It is clever but the lack of editorial can render it a bit dull.
- 'Zeitgeist'' is a very Guardiany name by the way. Although newsmap is entirely doeswhatitsaysonethetin.
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Share4 February 2010 4:14PM
Trending???? Are you serious? Since when was Trend a verb??
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Share4 February 2010 4:16PM
It's giving me a headache....me no likey basically
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Share4 February 2010 4:20PM
Very Chris Morris. Maybe you could call it Rubik's News when you get all the colours in a line.
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Share4 February 2010 4:22PM
Even if it is weighted against massed click-ins by Charlie Brooker fans, isn't this going to be necessarily skewed by 'Thomas Pynchon Ate My Hamster' stories, over the meatier (or funnier, or distressing, or noteworthy, or... or boring...) stories that readers normally expect a newspaper, print or pixel, to draw their attention to? The Guardian has been sliding towards this please-write/edit-our-newspaper-for-us business for some time now. Are you really abandoning editorial control in favour of giving the punters what their clicks say they want? I think Aldous Huxley may have had a thing or two to say about this...
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Share4 February 2010 4:22PM
One question: will this result in more proper Guardian content or more celebrity-driven pap? We all know what the masses want to view...
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Share4 February 2010 4:25PM
Oddly enough I was thinking the website needed something like this this morning, as I walked home from the newsagent with my paper copy (yeah, just remember who pays yer salary mods (-: ).
I didn 't have a zeitgeist driver in mind though. It was more the thought that when reading the hard copy, you can scan lots more and sieve. It is hard to sieve a website, especially one as large and contentful, mmmh, as this one. Driven by the zeitgeist , it risks being just what the mob are finding interesting.
[Mob ? "Select mob" or "broad church" ? Let's not go there.]
The colours would work better if placed together, so you can see all the interesting things from an area together and home in. As it is they are just noisy.
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Share4 February 2010 4:32PM
zeitgeist is so, like, not now, cherubs.
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Share4 February 2010 4:36PM
The major flaw is that it uses colour as a key to understanding where the content is coming from. Anyone with any idea about website accessibility will tell you how it would fail any major accessibility testing. All your users with colour impairments will hate this concept.
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Share4 February 2010 4:37PM
It's a bit like this site http://newsmap.jp/ which has been around for ages :)
I like your one too though.
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Share4 February 2010 4:38PM
Doh, noticed that other people have mentioned newsmap too.
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Share4 February 2010 4:41PM
I don't know if it is me but the whole screen appears to slant to the right when I look at it on a desktop computer. Weird.
Also, it badly needs a hover-over add-on. Would be nice to get standfirst or first para or something. www.newsmap.jp does it way better.
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Share4 February 2010 4:46PM
As we said in the post above, this is very much a work in progress, and we expect to change it over coming days/weeks, so thanks for your great feedback and suggested tweaks.
We're familiar with http://newsmap.jp/ which is a fantastic visualisation of a wide news array (though I find it quite hard on the eyes). Our Zeitgeist is different, for all the reasons outlined in the blog post above, though there is some similarity in the way it looks. I guess there are only so many ways you can show blocks on a screen...
Like I say, though, it's going to continue to change over time, and we're already thinking about how we might incorporate some of your suggestions (and have a few other things up our sleeves).
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Share4 February 2010 4:53PM
"Zeitgeistiness" and "Zeitgeisty" I can handle. It's "trending" that made me want to reach for the red ink in disgust. Did that get past the subs or are the subs themselves to blame?
Just because we're doing modern stuff, it doesn't mean we have to make the language crude and ugly in the process, surely...
Interesting idea, mind.
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Share4 February 2010 4:57PM
"...and now over to the news with Piet Mondrian"
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Share4 February 2010 5:05PM
@ dfic1999
Brilliant name (because let's face it, outside of Herder,Hegel and German philosophy, zeitgeist gets used in a kinda wanky,pseudy way).
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Share4 February 2010 5:06PM
like it...
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Share4 February 2010 5:11PM
I think it works well and prompted me to read things I otherwise wouldn't.
The only thing I don't think works is the use of images with text on a coloured background across them, it looks messy and spoils the picture. Why not put a coloured border around the box instead with the text appearing on mouse over instead?
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Share4 February 2010 5:14PM
Great concept good to embrace the digital media further as the old format was very much like a newspaper layout ...
From a graphic sense its such a shame to have the tabs that ID each colour in a vertical - they would lie great in a horizontal strip like a rainbow page from a Pantone book!
It will be important to not become to populist - its great that the look will respond to customer interest in each story but it would be even better if there was an option for the content to relate to the personal browsing habits of each individual user - so those with an interest in a particular subject will have their fields of interest highlighted also.
Nice work keep it up push it as far as you can!
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Share4 February 2010 5:24PM
By the way, white text on that yellow background for style. Not good, hard on the eyes.
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Share4 February 2010 5:27PM
@sadhu
See that's weird. I don't get the zeitgest thing and assumed it would appeal more to someone who was a visual person.
I can get information far quicker from the standard front page and don't really care what other people are looking at
However - and a fairly big however. This would be very nice on a touchscreen device. Links as big buttons ... mmmm ... yummy.
Finally, somewhat strangely the term zeitgeist is everso dated.
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Share4 February 2010 5:28PM
@dfic1999
I honestly did think about News Bingo for a while.
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Share4 February 2010 5:32PM
Ooh, goody. Just 2 things:
(a) Can we add our own colours and news stories?
(b) Can we call it 'FunkyZeit'?
Bet mine is better than yours.
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Share4 February 2010 5:32PM
If it helps people read more widely and intelligently, then great, but I share sentiment with ClubOwner in general.
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Share4 February 2010 5:34PM
@mastiles
The guardian generally has a rather unique way of dealing with the issue of accessibility. Each change appears to make the site less accessible.
Anyway. Thats old news. How about a monochrome option ? It would be everso simple to implement and keep the DDA off your back.
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Share4 February 2010 5:39PM
Zeitgeist? Please, that is only second in pretentiousness to Schadenfreude.
There is a little known law that allows anyone who hears/overhears someone else using this word to kick their face off. Singly or with help from others, either is OK.
Throw in a bit of glitteratti and Twitterati and the thin veneer that is my civilised state would peel away to reveal the levels of sickening violence I could perpetrate.
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Share4 February 2010 5:40PM
Very good, bookmarked.
It will help me to meet my target of wasting my time more efficiently.
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Share4 February 2010 5:43PM
Sorry, but what exactly is the point of this?
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Share4 February 2010 5:50PM
Agree the colour coding isn't particularly helpful although it does provide vibrancy design wise.
I'm a big fan of the carousel style picture galleries in the new iPhone app which allow you to rollover/touch for info but get guide you using images (rather than colour or text) in the first place.
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Share4 February 2010 5:52PM
I sort of like the idea but, visually, it needs more work.
I can see the reason to make the blocks colour-coordinate with their section headers, but the resulting mass of colour is pretty difficult to cope with. Those colours are fine as accents at the top of the page, but when they're all mashed together like that they're too much. And the title of the article, in a thin white font, gets lost.
The result is a big, confusing checkerboard of jarring colours that makes me very unlikely to visit zeitgeist again until it's had a redesign.
But keep trying - it's an interesting idea.
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