News and Happenings at HypeTracker.com

Preview of What's to Come

mark@hypetracker.com (Mark Lubischer) — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 16:42:08 GMT

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.

Lots of Progress

mark@hypetracker.com (Mark Lubischer) — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 20:29:32 GMT

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!

Context Sensitive Advertising Consequences and a Minor Update

mark@hypetracker.com (Mark Lubischer) — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 20:48:51 GMT

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.

The cause of it appears to be the list of recent articles where the term 'skiers' shows up quite a few times. This is just one of those unintended consequences of context sensitive advertising.

Oh, and we've added a new feature on the website, a Wikipedia link to more information about the various terms. Hopefully this will be useful to our visitors.

Another New Term

mark@hypetracker.com (Mark Lubischer) — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 17:19:38 GMT

We've added another new term to HypeTracker to bring our total count to 13.

The new term is 'doping' (+blood) and so far today it's #1 as a result of the Italian raid on the Austrian biathlon and cross-country teams.

Almost two weeks ago we added 'performance-enhancing drugs' in anticipation of some sort of scandal in the Olympics but it hasn't performed so well. We'll continue to monitor it but hopefully this new term will return some more substantial results.

ATOM vs RSS

mark@hypetracker.com (Mark Lubischer) — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 23:21:29 GMT

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:

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

What are your thoughts?

FeedBurner and new Top 10 Terms Feed

mark@hypetracker.com (Mark Lubischer) — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 21:05:57 GMT

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.

Updated Home Page

mark@hypetracker.com (Mark Lubischer) — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 01:20:59 GMT

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.

New Graphs, a Small Fix, and a Preview

mark@hypetracker.com (Mark Lubischer) — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 20:22:59 GMT

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!

Updates to Graphs

mark@hypetracker.com (Mark Lubischer) — Wed, 08 Feb 2006 21:38:17 GMT

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.

New Graph

mark@hypetracker.com (Mark Lubischer) — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 20:46:04 GMT

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?

MoMB: Museum of Modern Betas

mark@hypetracker.com (Mark Lubischer) — Sun, 05 Feb 2006 23:09:56 GMT

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!