It is no secret that Obama has been dominating news coverage for the past two months and particularly the past few weeks since the inauguration. I thought if there was ever one event that may have a shot at knocking him out of first place in global news coverage it would be the Super Bowl. And it was.

As part of the Kontexto news monitoring and analysis platform, we have just rolled out a breaking news coverage service the monitors over 1000 of the worlds largest online news publishers 24 hours a day and generates a 1, 2 and 3 hour view of news stories as they break.

I am including our breaking news coverage graph with a 1 hour, 2 hour and 3 hour view as of 1pm PST on Februrary 2, 2009.

Kontexto Breaking News Coverage 3 hour view

Kontexto Breaking News Coverage 2 hour view

Kontexto Breaking News Coverage 1 hour view

And just like you I DID notice that Michael Phelps has overtaken Obama as well in the past hour for his dabbles with the Mary Jane. I suspect the only thing that will change that is if Obama gets busted hitting the bong in the oval office in the next couple of hours.

We had a post about 6 weeks ago publishflow™ 576…17,128…3,720,000
that captured the measurement universe for our publishflow™ on-demand news measurement service on October 27th, 2008.

The most recent measurement universe numbers are out and they are 855… 21,778…4,729,925. That is to say that publishflow™ is measuring and analyzing 855 English language publishers, who produce 21,778 RSS feeds and generate 4,729,925 content items a month.

This is a big jump forward in the scope of content that publishflow™ is measuring and analyzing each day. Next up is a major international language publisher push.

So here we are 30 days later from the last post and it feels like 30 minutes. The last month has seen things go into complete overdrive for Kontexto. Financing, conference presentations, sales meetings, product development, new hires and all of the other things that go along with preparing for a new service launch. In our case the launch of publishflow™, our on-demand news measurement service for large web publishers. Throw in a global recession and things get more interesting.

Here are some of the highlights and learnings over the past 30 days for us:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) Start Up Tour:

Kontexto was selected to present at the Amazon Web Services Start Up Tour event in London, UK. The event drew about 250 local people from the tech community and the whole AWS crew from the U.S. was on hand to organize and drive the event. Our CTO Rick Van Well was in attendance as well, which let me deflect all the super hard core geek questions his way. All in all a great event that explored how to use AWS to start of software venture. You can check out our slide presentation below:

Met with 3 of Europe’s Largest English Language Newspapers:

I had a chance to meet with 3 of Europe’s largest English language newspapers in the past 30 days. I ran through a full demo of publishflow™ with them and was faced with thoughtful questions about the measurement and analysis we are presently doing with the service as well as other things we had not thought of doing. The feedback was essential in helping us to shape some of the future development tasks for publishflow™. The most important take away was the confirmation that publishflow™ when used in tandem with traditional web analytics packages and ad server data provides almost perfect insight into top performing stories over time. I am going to coin a new phrase for this “Return on Story”. It will be interesting to see if newspapers are willing to adopt new publishing measurement standards as the migrate nearly all of their resources towards the web. Our bet is yes.

New Hires:

We had been planning on doing this in a measured way regardless of the impending global meltdown. We have added a VP of North American Sales and a new programmer to help with some of the crazy things we wish to do with all of the underlying news flow data we are capturing. At this point, we are still very lean and are focused on sales and service improvements. Steady as she goes. We have varying opinions on the global meltdown and how bad it is going to be. If you want to know mine, you have to sit through a publishflow™ demo and then I will tell you.

buzzflow™ Development is Underway

Kontexto has always had the vision of applying our core media measurement and analysis platform to any vertical that either produces media content or needs to consume media content. That list could go on forever, which is exciting for us in terms of reacting to market opportunities, but you have to pick some to attack first in order to get some early feedback and to start making a name. buzzflow™ is our attack on the traditional notion of media monitoring. It is a service targeted at PR professionals who are interested in the next level of near real time news measurement and analysis on behalf of their clients. News in this context goes well beyond mainstream publications and digs into the social web and other dark places that conversations are happening about brands, products, people and events.

Lots more to come. We will be presenting at Money:Tech 2009 at the start of February in NYC, direct link to the session is below.

Amazon Web Services For Cheap On-Demand Text Measurement and Analysis

We love numbers here at publishflow™ , so I thought I would sum up the publishflow™ news measurement universe as a numeric code of 576…17,128…3,720,000.

publishflow™ is presently measuring and analyzing 576 English language publishers, who produce 17,128 RSS feeds and generate 3,720,000 content items a month. These respective numbers increase every few minutes so you can see how large our measurement and analysis universe is getting each day.

For the purposes of publishflow™, our on-demand news measurement service, we have been very selective in the English language news sources we are measuring and analyzing.

However, our customers are not just limited to the sources we are presently covering. publishflow™ can ingest any new set of publisher RSS feeds for measurement and analysis right away. So in effect, our customers can identify meaningful publishers we don’t currently measure and analyze and start tracking them as part of the publishflow™ service.

So at current publishing rates, it is gonna take about 4.6 million RSS feeds to hit the billion content items a month measured and analyzed. If Mc D’s can get to a billion served, so can we.

I know this seems like an absurd question, but I want to share some interesting data points that publishflow™ has uncovered about the official Barack Obama and John McCain websites.

publishflow™ measures and analyzes the publishing behavior of online publishers and although to date the focus has been on measuring and analyzing the publishing activity of over 500 of the largest online publishers in the world, we have added the official Barack Obama and John McCain websites to our coverage universe.

I did this for a couple of reasons.

First, to demonstrate how flexible and customizable the publishflow™ web service actually is when it comes to adding new publishers to measure and analyze. It took 2 minutes to begin measuring and analyzing the respective presidential candidates websites. This is something we have obsessed over when building out publishflow™, adding new online publishers to our coverage universe in near real time.

Second, I just had to find out what the online publishing behavior was for each of the campaigns in order to track their publishing rates, topic coverage and other behavior over time leading into the election in November 2008.

Just so you know I am not full of it, I am including a screencap of the respective publishflow™ administration profiles that display what content publishflow™ measures and analyzes and the associated meta data for each website.

BarackObama.com publishflow™ Admin Profile:

JohnMcCain.com publishflow™ Admin Profile:

So you can see that the Obama website has 3 RSS Feeds and the McCain website has 5 RSS Feeds that publishflow™ is measuring and analyzing.

Here is where it gets interesting.

JohnMcCain.com does not update its RSS Feeds:

BarackObama.com does update its RSS Feeds:

The Obama campaign has long been regarded as superior technically to the McCain campaign in terms of reach and use of new web services. Maybe publishflow™ just confirmed this.

If you can’t get RSS Feed Updates right, can you run a country?

I am including some screen caps of the publishflow™ on-demand publishing intelligence interface. Specifically the measurement and analysis of last nights presidential debate between McCain and Obama.

Presidential Debate News Presence:
Interesting to note that there was a tipping point on October 6th where coverage ramped up and all publishers began intensive coverage leading up to the debate. publishflow™ counts coverage as unique stories. Next phase for publishflow™ is to get the news presence interval down to 5 minute intervals so you can track a topic like a stock ticker, hang tight for that.

Presidential Debate Coverage by News Media Type:
Newspapers and TV dominated the coverage, no surprise there. I wish to point out that we have not released the flood gates yet on monitoring the complete blogosphere, we are monitoring all the blogs from the top 500 media brands, so if you are wondering why blog coverage is so low, this is why.

Presidential Debate News Coverage by Continent:
Although you would expect coverage in North America and Europe to dominate, publishflow™ is also tracking the biggest online English language publishers from the rest of the world. Next on deck is to begin tracking Spanish, German, French and Italian language publishers, which will change the continental coverage map significantly.

Presidential Debate Coverage by News Category:
It is interesting to see how publishers categorize “Presidential Debate” content on their sites. This is a breakdown of the various news categories selected by publishers. We find this view interesting because you can easily navigate through “Presidential Candidate” coverage by category, if you are in the mood for a longer analytical story, maybe op-ed will do it, or you can navigate to politics for a more thorough examination of the debates from far leaning righties or lefties.

We are about 10 days away from extending our private beta for publishflow™. Thanks to everyone who is staying up late and making this happen. Our grand vision of measuring and analyzing global publish flow is underway.

publishflow™ hit another media measurement and analysis milestone this week thanks to alot of hard work by our product development group.

publishflow™ is now aggregating, measuring and analyzing every online content item published by the top 100 US Newspapers.

I will clarify that when I speak of the “top 100 US newspapers”, it is based on the top 100 newspapers in the United States by largest reported circulation as compiled by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Although reported circulation is not a perfect translation for online traffic, the list is still a relatively good benchmark that captures the major newspaper publishers by audience size in the US.

So what are we doing with all this aggregation, measurement and analysis data?

In essence we are creating an on-demand publishing intelligence service that lets any online publisher create an account with us in order to track and monitor the real-time publishing behavior of themselves or their competition.

Whether you are an editor, reporter, writer, producer, researcher, blogger or senior exec… publishflow™ generates interesting stats, graphs and trends you can act on or just stare at as eye candy.

I can’t give up the goods just yet on the precise data points we are capturing and all the stats, graphs and trends we are seeing, but we will be extending the private beta in the next few months and I will slowly trickle out some blog posts with screencaps, datapoints and stats from publishflow™.

publishflow™ just busted through the 400 barrier. To be exact, publishflow™ is now tracking the publishing activity of 412 of the planets largest English language web publishers. This number is growing everyday. You can tell by the graph below that we are slacking on weekends, exposed.

412 English language web publishers being tracked in publishflow™:

412 of the planets largest English language web publishers cranked out 475,241 content items in the past 24 hours, check out the breakdown below:

publishflow™ content items tracked in past 24 hours:

Those are the cold hard facts. Our developers are now spending alot of their time on the emergence, sentiment and attention side of things which implements alot of our secret sauce text analysis, link analysis and other activity analysis in order to produce interesting stats, trends and graphs for publishflow™ users.

One of the new features we are testing in publishflow™, is a near real-time topic tracker graph that monitors every mention of a particular topic in every content item tracked in publishflow™. We then push this data into a line graph that changes over different time intervals including seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks and months depending on the topic and the view selected.

The idea started with a seemingly simple thing we wanted to do… track a topic like we track a stock price. Why could we not view topic interest fluctuate the same way we watch a stock price fluctuate?

Surely our publishflow™ users including editors, reporters, journalists, bloggers, producers etc… could spot topics that are building momentum, losing momentum and topics that are out right blowing up into what we call “Topic Bubbles”.

And beyond publishflow™, our other web services investflow™ and buzzflow™ could use the same near real-time topic tracking for monitoring tickers, companies, personalities and brands.

It will be interesting to see if the topic tracker can be used to make momentum based content creation decisions the same way stock price tracking can be used for momentum stock trading decisions.

Here is the first sneek peek at the publishflow™ topic tracker using a 7 days view. I have included a few big topics of interest over the past 7 days that have formed “Topic Bubbles” and you can see how topic coverage skyrocketed and then plummeted. Coverage numbers are on the y-axis and days is on the x-axis.

Google Chrome Coverage Explodes and Plummets

Sarah Palin Creates A Mount Kenya Type Peak

Hurricane Gustav Coverage Tanks As The Hurricane Weakens

Our developers are moving towards a seconds and minutes topic tracking view that I will post when we are ready to go with it. The seconds and minutes view will hopefully push topic tracking to the next level and expose some interesting near real-time trends that web publishers can act on.

A few days ago we took a look at how the largest global publishing brands were overwhelmingly covering Obama and the Democratic convention relative to other topics, No Surprise Obama Dominates Coverage.

This week was supposed to be John McCain’s turn to dominate the global publishing world with the start of the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-Saint Paul. Unfortunately, mother nature has other plans and Hurricane Gustav has stolen the spotlight from John McCain in convincing fashion.

I am including a publishflow™ 2 day view of Google News Content Coverage and a 2 day view and Yahoo! News Content Coverage and you will note that both news aggregators are convincingly spitting out Hurricane Gustav stories at twice the rate of John McCain stories.

Google News Content Coverage - 2 Day View:

Yahoo! News Content Coverage - 2 Day View:

I think these numbers reveal a larger challenge for John McCain that may only become apparent 9 weeks from now when voters take to the polls. I am wondering if it’s possible that John McCain has missed the crucial window of media availability and exposure to the general U.S. population due to a natural weather phenomenom and the rescheduling of the Republican National Convention.

If you take the collective amount of attention that would have been given to McCain via articles, video clips, tv broadcasts and radio broadcasts during the Republican National Convention that was diverted to coverage of Hurricane Gustav, his visibility and messaging was harmed.

Who knows if it can determine an election, but if it does, we have the numbers to back it.