Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Twitter search is a great tool for gauging persistence of interest

I do occasional maintenance on this widget because it has a couple hundred installs, so I should. Its value decreases when it doesn’t include enough timely searches.

(Click on “Search this” to refresh the widget and try another search.)

The rotating content leans heavily to Twitter Search because I think it’s such a fascinating way to get something of a handle on the pulse of opinion. To update it I add searches, and I also check the current searches to see if the results still show recent activity. (See the archive of currently rotating searches as well as retired searches. Note to Expression Engine heads: that archive page shows open entries for the active searches and closed entries for the retired ones—so easy.)

I’m getting to it now; thank you for your patience, just had to set it up. I’ve been surprised that interest in certain search terms has not waned as much as I would have expected. For example, “auto industry” and “iphone+storm” are not in the news as much as they were a few weeks ago when I added them, but they persist in racking up a lot of current results.

A slightly different sort of custom tool that tracks persistence of interest could be useful for research conducted by media outlets, and maybe other types of businesses, but I’m more tuned in to media and think of it first. Examples:

- Mainstream media, like monthly print magazines, having longer lead times, to see what people are still interested in.

- Even for more instant media, like TV or blogs, it could be handy for planning more-produced, better-researched features. If there’s no longevity to public interest in a given topic, it might not be worth the investment.

Of course this assumes there is a spot of value in the idea of enduring interest, and not just in the latest thing. Sometimes I despair of our “newest is all there is” way of looking at news and everything else.

If you wanted to go all radical, you might even say that sustained public interest in a topic maps to its importance and consequence. Nah…