The Scoop: Lingospot: dynamic topic pages come to sacbee.com

The Scoop

A blog about what's new and changing on sacbee.com

May 4, 2009

Lingospot: dynamic topic pages come to sacbee.com

We continue to work on all kinds of new and interesting technologies to deploy across The Sacramento Bee's Web sites, and one of the newest and most notable is the rollout of topic pages on sacbee.com.

We are using Lingospot, an agreggator, to crawl and analyze the content of sacbee.com to pick out the most relevant topics to our users. The technology's key strength lies in the selection and ranking of topics based on the likelihood that our readers will be interested in each one. Once the topics are selected, Lingospot directs traffic to topic pages, which include content from a variety of sources - first and foremost sacbee.com (articles, blog postings, photos) and external sources such as Twitter, other local media, blogs, Wikipedia, the Associated Press, and more.

What does this mean to you, the reader? It means that you will now start to see words and terms hyperlinked within the body of a story. Clicking on that link will take you to our "topic portal" for that subject.

For example, you may have noticed that our on-going coverage of the swine flu has links to this page. You can find our current topics page by clicking on the Topics link under News in our navigation bar. There are also "Related Articles", "Related Topics" and "Popular Topics" widgets on every story page.

Our goal with this technology is to deliver more information to our readers from a variety of sources. As soon as a topic becomes "popular" it will automatically be linked across sacbee.com, and topics pages will refresh automatically to bring you the latest news. (A perfect example: expect to see "Santa Claus" become a timely, popular topic as Christmas nears.)

There are lots of interesting developments taking place in the shop these days, but this is one of the more notable and exciting ones, and our hope is that it will quickly become a popular feature of our site. As always, we welcome your feedback and suggestions.

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The Scoop is a blog where the managers of sacbee.com talk about new initiatives and our plans for sacbee.com. You can reach us by at the e-mail addresses below or you can comment on our postings.

Tom Negrete is managing editor of The Bee and oversees the daily work of journalists who produce news content for the newspaper and sacbee.com. Negrete, who has been at The Bee since 1994, has served as assistant managing editor for business and sports, sports editor and assistant city editor. E-mail him at tnegrete@sacbee.com or reach him at (916) 321-1171.

Seán McMahon is The Bee's Director of Digital Media, overseeing the interactive efforts of the company. His e-mail is smcmahon@sacbee.com.

Linda Gonzales is digital team leader for Sacbee.com and has been an editor at The Bee since 1995. You can email her at lgonzales@sacbee.com.