Sitegeister, huh?

I recently mentioned something called "Sitegeister". This is a little concept I came up with back in the Spring and wanted to do something with it.

The name is a play on both "web site" and "zeitgeist", and a "sitegeist" is a summary of the topic of a site, in much the same way a "zeitgeist" is the topic of an era. "Sitegeister", then, is the actor that determines the sitegeist.

Sitegeister subscribes to RSS/Atom feeds from various websites (news aggregators, blogs, whatever) and analyzes the content of the feeds to determine the topics (topics are reset weekly). These topics are located at the bottom of the main Sitegeister page. For example, as I write this, the top topics (or concepts) on the Yahoo! most popular news feeds are  "candidate palin", "candidate sarah", "gulf hurricane", "hurricane orleans", "palin running", "running sarah", and others. Obviously, some overlap between these concepts exist.

After determining the top concepts, Sitegeister then draws the blob on the top of the main page. This is a link-map and tries to connect sites to other sites. Each blob is a Site and is surrounded by it's top concepts. Concepts from one site that are related to another site's concepts are linked via an edge. This is all good stuff and relies heavily on Latent Semantic Indexing and Vector Space Models and angles between vectors and really helped me marry my math background with my love of language.

Unfortunately, I geisted the wrong sites. Most of my sites are news aggregators and they all tend to converge on the same concepts. That means that the blob-map tends towards fully-connectedness (which means it is a mess) and really doesn't reveal anything. I need to choose other sites that may or may not be related, like various blogs. It may be interesting to determine links between blogs that advertise different topics.

Or maybe not. Either way, it was a fun excercise, and demonstrates that Google AdSense works really, really well. The FAQ at Sitegeister.com has more information.

September 05, 2008 by Brent Schneeman

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