Attention Junction, what’s your function? To analyze the views of two
Wikipedia pages, identify spans of public interest, find overlaps, and turn
them into Google / Google News searches.
I have written before about my vision of Wikipedia page view data as
“fossilized attention.” By analyzing a Wikipedia article’s views over time,
you can identify days of high public interest, which probably mean
something newsworthy/noteworthy happened. I have used this idea
with Wikipedia Seismograph and the Gossip Machine portion of MiniGladys,
but those identify individual days.
I wanted to see if I could make something that identified spans of public
interest in a Wikipedia page, as sustained interest is even more indicative
than a single day of spiked page views. And once you can identify a span,
why not analyze two pages at a time to find where the spans overlap? I
found that this was a fascinating way to explore a big story with a lot of
different players — by analyzing different pairs of topics, you can find
different time spans and different story angles around an event.
(Attention Junction is free to use and free of ads.)
https://attentionjunction.com/
Received on Wed Jul 23 2025 - 10:43:00 EDT