ETAPA 3: Determinación del número óptimo de transformadores

Sometimes you’re interested in the activity that’s surrounding a particular story, rather than an entire website. The tools below give you different angles on how people are reading, responding to, copying, and sharing content on the web.

Bit.ly

I always turn to bit.ly when I want to know how people are sharing a particular link with each other. To use it, enter the URL you’re interested in. Then click on the Info Page+ link. That takes you to the full statistics page (though you may need to choose “aggregrate bit.ly link” first if you’re signed in to the service). This will give you an idea of how popular the page is, including activity on Facebook and Twitter, and below that you’ll see public conversations about the link provided by backtype.com. I find this combination of traffic data and conversations very helpful when I’m trying to understand why a site or page is popular, and who exactly its fans are. For example, it provided me with strong evidence that the prevailing narrative about grassroots sharing and Sarah Palin was wrong.

Twitter

As the micro-blogging service becomes more widely used, it becomes more useful as a gauge of how people are sharing and talking about individual pieces of content. It’s deceptively simple to discover public conversations about a link. You just paste the URL you’re interested in into the search box, and then possibly hit “more tweets” to see the full set of results.

Google’s Cache

When a page becomes controversial, the publishers may take it down or alter it without acknowledgment. If you suspect you’re running into the problem, the first place to turn is Google’s cache of the page as it was when it did its last crawl. The frequency of crawls is constantly increasing, so you’ll have the most luck if you try this within a few hours of the suspected changes. Enter the target URL in Google’s search box, and then click the triple arrow on the right of the result for that page. A graphical preview should appear, and if you’re lucky, there will be a small “Cache” link at the top of it. Click that to see Google’s snapshot of the page. If that has trouble loading, you can switch over to the more primitive text-only page by clicking another link at the top of the full cache page. You’ll want to take a screen- shot or copy-paste any relevant content you do find, since it may be invalidated at any time by a subsequent crawl.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine

If you need to know how a particular page has changed over a longer time period, like months or years, the Internet Archive runs a service called The Wayback Ma- chine that periodically takes snapshots of the most popular pages on the web. You go to the site, enter the link you want to research, and if it has any copies, it will show you a calendar so you can pick the time you’d like to examine. It will then present a version of the page roughly as it was at that point. It will often be missing styling or images, but it’s usually enough to understand what the focus of that page’s content was then.

View Source

It’s a bit of a long shot, but developers often leave comments or other clues in the HTML code that underlies any page. It will be on different menus depending on your browser, but there’s always a “View source” option that will let you browse the raw HTML. You don’t need to understand what the machine-readable parts mean, just keep an eye out for the pieces of text that are often scattered amongst them. Even if they’re just copyright notices or mentions of the author’s names, these can often give important clues about the creation and purpose of the page. TinEye

Sometimes you really want to know the source of an image, but without clear attribution text there’s no obvious way to do this with traditional search engines like Google. TinEye offers a specialized “reverse image search” process, where you give it the image you have, and it finds other pictures on the web that look very similar. Because they use image recognition to do the matching, it even works when The Web as a Data Source | 135

a copy has been cropped, distorted, or compressed. This can be extremely effective when you suspect that an image that’s being passed off as original or new is being misrepresented, since it can lead back to the actual source.

YouTube

If you click on the Statistics icon to the lower right of any video, you can get a rich set of information about its audience over time. While it’s not complete, it is useful for understanding roughly who the viewers are, where they are coming from, and when.

Emails

If you have some emails that you’re researching, you’ll often want to know more details about the sender’s identity and location. There isn’t a good off-the-shelf tool available to help with this, but it can be very helpful to know the basics about the hidden headers included in every email message. These work like postmarks, and can reveal a surprising amount about the sender. In particular, they often include the IP address of the machine that the email was sent from, a lot like caller ID on a phone call. You can then run whois on that IP number to find out which organization owns that machine. If it turns out to be someone like Comcast or AT&T who provide connections to consumers, then you can visit MaxMind to get its approximate location.

To view these headers in Gmail, open the message and open the menu next to reply on the top right and choose “Show original”.

You’ll then see a new page revealing the hidden content. There will be a couple of dozen lines at the start that are words followed by a colon. The IP address you’re after may be in one of these, but its name will depend on how the email was sent. If it was from Hotmail, it will be called X-Originating-IP:, but if it’s from Outlook or Yahoo it will be in the first line starting with Received:.

Running the address through Whois tells me it’s assigned to Virgin Media, an ISP in the UK, so I put it through MaxMind’s geolocation service to discover it’s coming from my home town of Cambridge. That means I can be reasonably confident this is actually my parents emailing me, not impostors!

Trends

If you’re digging into a broad topic rather than a particular site or item, here’s a couple of tools that can give you some insight:

Wikipedia Article Traffic

If you’re interested in knowing how public interest in a topic or person has varied over time, you can actually get day-by-day viewing figures for any page on Wiki- pedia at http://stats.grok.se/. This site is a bit rough and ready, but will let you uncover the information you need with a bit of digging. Enter the name you’re

interested in to get a monthly view of the traffic on that page. That will bring up a graph showing how many times the page was viewed for each day in the month you specify. Unfortunately you can only see one month at a time, so you’ll have to select a new month and search again to see longer-term changes.

Google Insights

You can get a clear view into the public’s search habits using Insights from Google (http://www.google.com/insights/search/; Figure 4-11). Enter a couple of common search phrases, like “Justin Bieber vs Lady Gaga”, and you’ll see a graph of their relative number of searches over time. There’s a lot of options for refining your view of the data, from narrower geographic areas, to more detail over time. The only disappointment is the lack of absolute values—you only get relative percen- tages, which can be hard to interpret.

Figure 4-11. Google Insights (Google)

— Pete Warden, independent data analyst and developer