News and Happenings at HypeTracker.com

We've been quite busy working on building the new version of HypeTracker and thought it was about time that we give you a sneak peak at what it's going to look like.



We're happy with the new design of it and are looking forward to starting some end-user testing in the very near future. 

If you would like to be involved with the testing and see what's coming, drop us a line with your contact information and we'll put you on a list for private testing once we get a few more things ironed out.

Well, it's been a few days since my last post on here because we've been working feverishly on the next version of HypeTracker and have been making tremendous progress.

The new version has support for ad-hoc queries and generates graphs in under a second!

Most of the stuff we're working on is behind the scenes stuff, as a user you won't see it but it'll be working hard to serve your needs and curiosities.

One of those hidden items that's really cool is our Request Broker for the ad-hoc queries.  The request broker system handles incoming ad-hoc requests, monitors performance and term usage, caches the results of frequently used terms, prioritizes queries for paying users, and a lot more.

We're excited about the forthcoming version and hope you are too!

I was browsing around on HypeTracker and came across what I'm sure is a very unintended advertisement.  On our Doping (+Blood) details page an ad for Bode Miller has been showing up.

We put this blog online January 30th and have been generating statistics on it now for just over half a month... stats on pageviews, visits, referrals... really all kinds of interesting stuff.

From those stats, I've been noticing an interesting trend with regards to the RSS and ATOM feeds that are available. (We did change over to FeedBurner so I'll probably see this info disappear shortly)

While the media keeps talking about RSS, all of our stats are showing that ATOM seems to be the preferred format, generating 4 times the number of requests that RSS gets.

I've got a couple of theories regarding this phenomenon:

1. ATOM is a superior syndication format
2. More aggregators use ATOM
   
3. Aggregators that use ATOM poll for updates more frequently
4. Programmers prefer ATOM (based on the fact that the majority of the site's referrals come from programming related websites)
   

What are your thoughts?

We've been linked to from the Mueseum of Modern Betas, "a site dedicated to listing webbased applications on a beta trip."

http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/beta/hypetracker

Welcome everyone coming from MoMB! 

We would love to hear any feedback and thoughts that you have about HypeTracker.com!

We made a minor change to the statistics engine over the last couple of days that should hopefully improve the daily ranks and counts.

If you happened to view the statistics Wednesday or Thursday morning, you may have noticed that there were some topics that seemed out of place.  For instance "Iran" (+nuclear) was down approx 2800% with zero instances in the news.

This oddity was a result of our statistics engine capturing fresh news stories too early in the day. 

Right now, we're a little limited in the information we can capture but we're working on implementing we've implemented a more frequent scanning system for the current phase so that we can keep the graphs fresher throughout the day until Phase 2 is available.

Also, we're working on coming up with some sort of dashboard view for the home page of the site.  It seems as though the main page is a little bit long alread with only 8 terms.

We have a couple of concept dashboards in the works and would like to hear your thoughts on what information you would like to see at a glance on the home page.

Some Random Information:

Total Webpages In Database: 41,333
Webpages Excluded from Results:  16,193*
Webpages Returning HTTP Errors:  1,658

* Webpages excluded include those missing the given term, having an unknown date (working on this), or returning HTTP errors.

Just wanted to take a second to welcome you to the new HypeTracker.com website blog.

Here you will find information about the current system, the coming features, and any other random related musings we happen to have.

Although we have a lot of ideas for the future of HypeTracker.com, we're open to any suggestions and recommendations that you have.  Please feel free to share those with us through comments in our blog or via the Feedback Form.

For those of you interested in the features that are forthcoming to HypeTracker, we'll be posting some more details in the next few days.  There's a lot of great stuff on the way!

To try and get some interactivity going here, let's start this blog off with a request for some terms that you would like to see graphed on HypeTracker.

Thanks!