What makes Zeitgeist tick
Post categories: innovation
| 10:51 UK time, Wednesday, 29 September 2010
In July I pointed you to a prototype being developed by BBC Research and Development: "Zeitgeist".
Now comes a follow up post from Sean O'Halpin: "What Makes Zeitgeist Tick"
Today we're publishing the full source code of this system under the GNU GPLv3 licence on github at https://github.com/bbcrd/zeitgeist...The system consists of an interface to the Twitter Streaming API which passes tweets to a processing pipeline. The pipeline finds and extracts links to the BBC, resolving shortened and redirected urls... Finally, there's a web interface to present the results to end users, which was written using the well-tested software stack of Sinatra, Thin and nginx, all fronted by a Squid proxy. The Zeitgeist database is mysql, the modelling done using Datamapper.
There's lots more detail and a diagram at the BBC Research and Development blog.
Nick Reynolds is Social Media Executive, BBC Online.
