I have often toyed with the idea of a program that would periodically go to news sources and look at the number of available articles, then crossreference this value with other news sources as a measure of global activity. I have now created a rudimentary implementation of this idea that reads the number of articles on the frontpage of Google Newsâ„¢, averages the number of articles over 10 calls at 0.5 seconds per call, then saves this value to a file. The process is repeated once per minute, and can be viewed in a variety of graphical formats, with more views coming soon. You can see the progress so far here:

View
Google Newsâ„¢ Trends
Way cool, Kerm. Can't wait to see a month out.
Thanks jpez. I'm thinking of adding a frontpage quickView indicator of the current activity level as well as a possible sig image. I also see by http://www.cemetech.net/projects/newstrends.php?mode=simple&time=5 that we're heading into a high-activity time again.
To be added this evening or soon thereafter:

Within 10% of absolute maximum!
Current upward trend
Holding steady
Current downward trend
Within 10% of absolute minimum
/me thinks you should sell this to google....
Oh c'mon, you know Google - they would probably be able to replicate my work in about half an hour or less. Very Happy Seriously though, it's an interesting idea. Let's deal with finishing it to some extent followed by Digg'ing first, eh?
so... uh... what does it all mean? Confused
Added the trend indicators.

It's a graphical display of the state of the world, as indicated by the number of news articles present each minute on http://news.google.com . Makes sense?
This'd make a nice widget or extension.
Thanks, and thanks for the comment on Digg. But you didn't actually Digg it. Very Happy
Forgive me, I have no idea what I'm doing with digg. I know that's going to sound strange, but I'm actually only somewhat nerdy. Hehe, goes to digg. Very Happy
everyone digg this diggity thing, lets get Kerm on the frontpage.
An excellent idea! I need to induce the other TI sites to contribute some diggs...
Maybe this is purposeful for some strange unknown reason, but the ads at the bottom of the page are in Japanese or Chinese or Korean or something like that once in a while. This doesn't happen anywhere else on the site. Is there any reason and/or explination to this?
Yeah, I've noticed that as well. No clue about that. :/ I blame Google. Razz
And the new line graph view:
http://www.cemetech.net/projects/newstrends.php?graph=vline&color=normal&mode=simple&time=1
*bump*
# Line Graph view perfected (except for axis labels)
# Digg feed added
# Signature mockup:
hmm, I am afraid of the massive bump in amount of registered members now, you were at like 600 a few days ago. you gotta watch for spambots cuz if you posted this on digg maybe you'll get a lot x.x.
Yeah, I've gotten about 300 spambots in the last few days. I'm gonna go deal with it right now.
Kerm: You're horizontal and vertical bar graphs are still backwards.... And the line graph is messed up, because its lows don't line up at all with the lows in the other graphs - it appears to be on a different scale
That's because the bar graphs show 0 as the baseline, whereas the line graph shows the minimum as the baseline.
  
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