News and Happenings at HypeTracker.com

Just wanted to let everyone know that we've updated our RSS feeds to point to FeedBurner.  We setup a 301 permanent redirect to the new location so most RSS aggregators should be able to update them automatically. If not, we apologize for the inconvenience.

The new Blog RSS feed is located at http://feeds.feedburner.com/hypetracker

We've also created a new RSS feed of the Top 10 HypeTracker terms.  You can subscribe to it at http://feeds.feedburner.com/hypetrackertop10

We'll probably make some minor formatting changes to the new feed as we use it but we won't be moving it.

Well, the preview I posted earlier didn't last too long, we've already moved the concept into production... release early and often. 

Anyway, I hope everyone likes the new home page.  It's a lot more functional and should be able to handle a lot more terms without becoming too long.  There was really starting to be a lot of scrolling to be done on the old home page to see all 12 terms that we're tracking so far.

We've got some more stuff on the way shortly, one of which is an RSS feed of the top terms, hopefully that will useful to those of you out there.

Over the last few days, we've added a couple of new graphs to the website.

The new terms added are 'google,' 'peak oil,' and 'renewable energy'

Thanks to those in the Joel On Software forum for their term suggestions! We're still looking for more terms to include so if you have any ideas, send them our way.

We also encountered some oddities with the statistics today when our search and indexing system started stepping on it's self.  We added a process check to make sure we won't have that anomaly again.

We're also going to be changing up the homepage of the site to a new interface sometime this afternoon or evening.

You can preview the new interface now though! It adds a lot of new functionality including the ability to view line or bar graphs, as well as a list of the most recent stories that are included in the results.  Enjoy!

We made some changes to the design of the graphs today based on the various feedback that we've received (thanks JoS users and others!). 

We're definitely not done with making changes (always want to improve) but I think today's changes made a big difference.

Probably the most noticeable of them is the removal of the gradient backgrounds from the charts.  We've replaced it with a solid medium blue so that they're more readable.

We've also added some light gray horizontal grid lines to help show the values of the peaks and valleys within the charts, we've made the corners square for clarity, and we've changed some of the colors that represent the websites in the graphs. (Hope that last one doesn't mess with too many people!)

Let us know if you like the changes or not.

With the Olympics just days away, we thought it would be a good idea to add another graph to HypeTracker to monitor one of the controversial items that frequently surrounds major sporting events... 'performance-enhancing drugs'

We've populated it with data and it can now be found on the main page of our site.

The usage count of the phrase seems to be a little bit on the low side of things with yearly combined totals of less than 600.

Maybe performance-enhancing drugs aren't a big deal or maybe there are some better words that we could use for it.

Some terms that have come to mind include:

• Anabolic Steroids
• Blood Doping
• HGH - Human Growth Hormone
• THG - Tetrahydrogestinone

Thoughts and suggestions?

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!