Welcome to The Hourly Press!

What it does

The site's central content is an ordered list of stories ranked by newsworthiness. Each story consists of a headline link, a snippet, and a list of comments by sources about the story, signaling why it's newsworthy.

The site's sidebar displays an editorial board and the top contributing sources ranked by their impact on this edition of News about News.

Readers can learn more about any story, editor or contributor by clicking on its expandible links: [+].

How it works

The Hourly Press is an example of an authoritative social filter. It shares some attributes with open social systems like Digg and others with formal organizations like newspaper editorial boards. It is based on a hierarchical projection of the twitter social graph rooted by a hand-selected editorial board.

The Hourly Press continually monitors twitter: it receives every update tweeted by any public twitter user who is followed by an editor. These twitter users are the sources of the site. Each source is given an authority score. For example, if three editors follow a source, that source has an authority of 3, etc. At the end of every hour, the Press analyzes every update issued by a source in the last twelve hours that also contains a link. Short links are resolved to the urls they point to, and each url receives a score equal to the number of sources it was cited by multiplied by their average authority. Urls are then ordered by score, and the 10 highest scoring urls become news stories for this edition.