one of the systems we’re working on is something designed to tell us what the world is paying attention to at any given moment — and not at the link level, but at the idea level, where we consider ideas to be collections of phrases. We’re measuring the click-rate on any given phrase, so we can tell you that “Jennifer Lopez,” for example, gets a typical 0.01 clicks/second click-rate, but when there was a potential dress malfunction at the Oscars, that went up to over 20 clicks/second. By watching this you’re able to see whenever something happens that gets enough attention from people that they’re actually clicking links about it. With Qaddafi, what I saw was what we call a “burst” in attention to that phrase.
Engagement Ain’t Nothing But A Number | PandoDaily
See also: “if you build it, they will come”.
