Parse.ly Currents: Where human intelligence and machine learning collide

What’s happening: Parse.ly Currents is a new free product for understanding news, information, and attention flows online, at a detailed and quantitative level. This information is openly and instantaneously available through a live dashboard. Why it matters: For the first time in history, deep concrete data about world news isn’t locked up in the data centres of big tech behemoths. How it works: Using its Analytics tool which measures online attention for better content engagement, Parse.ly trained algorithms to parse hundreds of thousands of digital news articles per day, and billions of news reading sessions. Content is placed into broad categories such as Politics, Business, Sports or Lifestyle, as well as unique topics, which are a specific person, place or thing, such as “Donald Trump” or “Elon Musk.” The data also shows where the traffic to the content came from, both geographically and by platform. Using a natural language processing (NLP) technology, Currents then groups reader attention into clusters of related content, called “Stories.” This enables a deeper understanding of sub-topics and sub-narratives. Digging Deeper: Parse.ly Currents can compare topics gaining momentum on Twitter with news that’s waning on Facebook; or information that’s suddenly searched for on Google. Users can learn what political stories are being promoted, and what stories are gaining or losing steam in virtually real-time. Currents information goes to a detailed level of topics, keywords and real-world events — showing not just what people search for or share, but what they actually read. Currents uses word vectors to identify articles that are about the same thing, cutting across categories, topics and events — an improvement over traditional NLP which can’t recognize events. The bottom line: The goal of Parse.ly Currents is to develop the world’s first transparent view of the ebb and flow of content and attention on the internet. The combination of machine learning and human intelligence that fuels the technology can measure and reveal vital information about the readership of online news content, giving a new depth of understanding to internet attention analytics at an artificial intelligence level. All of this data is available now with a free subscription, and queries across billions of data points will return to your browser within seconds.