The Evolving Newsroom

Bit.ly looks at Twitter-based news service

A Wired article about Bit.ly’s plans for growth includes a couple of lines about the url shortening service looking at generating a news service based on tweets.

‘When the world’s 20 million or so Twitter users click links in their feeds, most of the time, they’re routed through bit.ly’s URL shortening service.

…

‘[Bit.ly's] going to mine those links to create a real-time news service that would work somewhat like Twitter trends, except that it would track the hottest links rather than the most-used words. The result would be a Digg-like news service comprised of links determined to be important by bit.ly’s analysis engine.

“We’re seeing more than a billion clicks in the course of a month,” said Cohen. “Looking at that volume of data, we can see the most interesting and the most important content that is being shared across the whole of the real-time web. Sometimes that’s humorous stuff — the other day, the most shared video we saw on the web was William Shatner performing a dramatic reading of Sarah Palin’s farewell address.

“But it’s also occasionally very serious. We were able to see the Neda video out of Iran trending well before CNN linked it in, and we’ve begun to refine our capabilities there to be able to pinpoint stories like that.”

‘He said part of this technique involves looking for links being shared by unlike people, because that means they have universal appeal.’