SignalNoi.se

iPhone 5 versus Libya social activity at Wired

Noah Shachtman who edits of one of my favorite blogs (Danger Room) at my favorite magazine (Wired),  just tweeted this:  

Not unexpected. But still slightly depressing when your iphone 5 traffic is 10x higher than your libya traffic.

— Noah Shachtman (@dangerroom) September 12, 2012

I thought it would be interesting to pull up the Signalnoi.se dashboard and share the social activity we’re tracking across these two stories on Wired. First, take a look at Wired’s Gadget Lab Apple liveblog. You notice a nice spike in tweets about the story (which as of now doesn’t contain much - latest update “09:54 : We’re inside!”).  

Spencer Ackerman’s earlier story on the Marines being sent to Libya after the deadly attack is still pulling respectable numbers, but as Noah pointed out, not unexpectedly, significantly lower than those of the Apple story.  

Tracking the new Egyptian President on Al Jazeera, the BBC and the Guardian

Today the Egyptian election commission announced Mohammed Morsi as the President of Egypt. Signalnoi.se was tracking the story across Al Jazeera English, the BBC and the Guardian websites and how it spread through Twitter and Facebook. I thought I’d share some of the charts that you’d see in the Signalnoi.se dashboard :

It is not unexpected that Al Jazeera English would see a tremendous gain with this story, especially as it was the de facto news source for the world over the 18 days of the Egyptian revolution leading to the ousting of former President Hosni Mubarak (disclosure : I was the Head of Online at Al Jazeera English until recently). Al Jazeera saw growth on Facebook, where their story was shared, liked and commented on over 11k times as of the writing of this post. 

While the Al Jazeera English post dominated both the BBC and the Guardian on Facebook, the BBC did better than Al Jazeera English on Twitter - it had over 450 more tweets than the Al Jazeera English story. What is also interesting about the BBC story is that the number of likes and comments on Facebook track each other. Like for like, they’re getting the most discussion across the three news outlets. 

Speaking of data and the elections, one of the most fascinating posts I read this evening was by Zeynep Tufekci titled the “Muslim Brotherhood Teaches a Lesson in Elections in the Age of Twitter and Google Spreadsheets”. She looks at how the Muslim Brotherhood used Twitter to constantly report data coming out of polling stations across Egypt and tabulated all the data in a Google doc in order to bring transparency to the process and thus limiting the ability of anyone to unfairly influence the outcome of the elections. 

Signalnoi.se wins Knight News Challenge, investment

Today the Knight Foundation announced at the MIT Media Lab that Signalnoi.se has won the Knight News Challenge. The Knight News Challenge accelerates media innovation by funding breakthrough ideas in news and information.

This years challenge was on Networks and was highly competitive. According to Knight there were over 1,000 applications, and this this challenge was 

…more competitive than in years past. This year, we’re running three contests, which means that instead of 12-15 winners per contest, we plan to select four or five. As a result, we will only be funding about 0.5%  of applications before us. (By comparison, last year Harvard admitted 6.2% of the applicants to its freshmen class.)

We’re excited about receiving this award and an investment from the Knight Foundation. 

Welcome to SignalNoi.se

We’ve just launched SignalNoi.se!

Our mission is to better journalism through social clarity. Founded by Mohamed Nanabhay and Haroon Meer, we provide actionable intelligence to publishers and editors who want to optimise their editorial decision-making. By tracking social engagement with the news we provide real-time insight into what stories are resonating with audiences – both on your website and across the web.