Zeitgeist is a prototype to highlight the most shared BBC web pages on Twitter, a digest to link people to the hottest BBC pages.
Project date: Summer 2010
Objectives of project
The project is part of a larger area of exploration to see how the BBC can use real-time trending data to enrich user experiences and how we should handle streams of data at this rate and volume. We developed Zeitgeist as a simple information source for users and to provide insight into users' interests and behaviours for our production teams
Click Here is an introductory blog post about the project.
Research approach
The system combines a custom-built ingest chain using Twitter's public APIs to search for tweets containing a BBC URL. As it's running in real-time these links come and go depending on what Twitter users are talking about.
There is more detail on the technical approach in this Click blog post
Research outcomes
We also created a different view for BBC employees, which allows us to see the tweet history of each link, a full list of tweets, the most retweeted messages, hashtags and common keywords.
The Zeitgeist is in use by journalists across the BBC, including the BBC Academy. You can try the prototype live Click here.
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