BoardTracker

Samting new, samting now!

Sun May 24, 2009 2:59 pm (GMT 0)

Author: Support
Subject: Samting new, samting now!
Posted: Sun May 24, 2009 2:59 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

We recently launched a new experimental site for "real time search" which is the latest buzzword (or phrase) and everyone is jumping on that bandwagon so naturally we too had to get a piece of that action!

Actually boardtracker has been doing near real time indexing & search (and "persistent search") of forum posts for years already coz we're so cool..

Anyway, our new toy is at samting.com and includes data from forums, twitter, blogs, feeds, friendfeed etc. Like Internet Mood Report, Samting also uses the BTv2 api as well as others and is an example of what can be built to pass the time on a slow day..

Obama on the Boardscape

Wed Jan 21, 2009 4:25 pm (GMT 0)

Author: Support
Subject: Obama on the Boardscape
Posted: Wed Jan 21, 2009 4:25 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 3

So the big day finally arrived, the Obama inauguration is done and he is now president. Naturally it is a hot topic on the internet and there's a whole lot of chatter going on so we did a quick check to see just how much obama natter there has been on the forums over the last 24 hours.

So as of 3pm GMT on January 21st..

Obama posts account for 4.6% of all english language posts on the boardscape in the last 24 hours.

In addition non-english obama posts on forums account for 1.2% of all non-english posts - however this only includes posts that actually use the english spelling of 'obama' so things like arabic, hebrew & chinese posts will be under-represented in this case.

As the world wakes up to the first full day of the Obama reign it will be interesting to see if the discussion increases or rapidly fades away.. we will check the stats again tomorrow and over the next few days to find out..

All the data used is from posts indexed in BoardTracker v2 .

Internet Mood Report

Tue Sep 23, 2008 1:28 pm (GMT 0)

Author: Support
Subject: Internet Mood Report
Posted: Tue Sep 23, 2008 1:28 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 2

Just a quick post to announce a new site we just opened..

Internet Mood Report
http://www.internetmoodreport.com

Shows the mood of users and sites, for example here's twitter.

It's just a bit of fun but also a showcase for what can be built using our BTv2 API which will be available soon (or now if anyone specifically requests it but it is currently undocumented).

ICWSM 2008 - Seattle

Sun Mar 30, 2008 3:17 am (GMT 0)

Author: Administrator
Subject: ICWSM 2008 - Seattle
Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 3:17 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Tomorrow starts the ICWSM 2008 conference (http://www.icwsm.org), this year in Seattle. So far, not as sunny as Colorado of last year, but there in an undeniable charm to a city in snow.
The first day of the conference will begin in the late afternoon, with two tutorial sessions:
1. Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis, by Jan Wiebe: about the methods for analysis of data (text) for subjective detection, measurement and analysis, allowing extraction of opinions and attitudes from textual content. With respect to the Boardscape, there is very little research done so far in detecting fluctuation of public opinion across forums. How do we define subjectivity in forums? How do we detect it? Is the subjective "lexicon" in forums different than other social spaces such as the blogosphere or opinion sites?

As for the propagation of opinion-forming information between forums, this is where the second session fits..
2. Graph Mining Techniques for Social Media Analysis by Mary McGlohon and Christos Faloutsos: How do social structures form within a community? How do we measure and map it? How do we analyze trends, information and influence propagation? This is especially interesting for forums, to both try to identify social structures within a given forum, as well as social indirect relations between separate forums.

As we plan to open BoardTracker API to researchers, it would be interesting to see more academic research focusing on message boards.

The NEW BoardTracker is here!...

Wed Sep 05, 2007 8:25 pm (GMT 0)

Author: Administrator
Subject: The NEW BoardTracker is here!...
Posted: Wed Sep 05, 2007 8:25 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 9

I know.. we said that repeatedly in the past, but here it comes.. BoardTracker Version 2 is HERE. Granted, in beta, but public beta.

So here is the story...

We are launching the new BoardTracker now under a separate subdomain.. http://v2.boardtracker.com/
We keep the older version under www, until version 2 is ready to fully replace the existing one. Once that happens, v2 will change to www and the old system will be fully transferred to the new one, accounts, settings, the works..

When will that happen?
In the coming days certain milestones should be met, each such milestone will get us closer to the official launch. Note that during that time, both systems will be working.
While at it, new boards will be added to the new system and both the tag and search mods will be running from both systems. Note that if you have a mod installed, you do not need to do anything right away. You 'could' shift to v2 in the meantime, but we advise to simple wait patiently until the official shift.

Why not shift systems now? Why??
The new version of BoardTracker is several magnitudes bigger and more complex that the existing system. This causes several issues during the transition. Those issues both require us to carefully shift the system as well as cause certain problems and limitations while the shift occurs.

Limitations? Such as?
Slowness, missing features, partial coverage of data.
All those will be dealt with in the coming days. As days pass, so will the slowness, lack of full coverage and missing features.

So what are the milestones? When do we get to see the new version replacing the old one?
1. Coverage: By the end of this month (probably within 15 days), recent data should start showing on the index. While now we the index is about 20 days behind, the system is heavily indexing (at a rate of about 7 million posts a day). As time passes the gap will be closed. Also, as time passes, new boards will start showing in the search. Note that many of those boards are already in the system, but not yet showing in the search.
(As was said before, the new system will be working during this time, but the coverage will be partial until it finishes catching up).

2. Slowness: The new system will be dog slow (and in this case we don't mean cute little puppy kind of slow, but simply bad kind of dog slow. Both search and browse (see next milestone..) will be slow but will catch up in speed as time passes. As part of the change, we are in a process of setting up the backbone/infrastructure of the new system. We expect to see the first change in speed in about 8 days and the final and more significant change in speed before the end of the month (hopefully around the 28th).

3. Features: Certain features in the system are faulty, not working, or working in the wrong way, others are simply missing or saying "coming soon". At the moment we know of them all, so for now there is no need to alert us of any. By the end of the month we expect to see most of them represented in their working state.
Among those features are: Browse, Thread tools (member ignore, report bad links ..)
In addition the following parts of the system are not showing/functional since they are still working from the old system and will not be switched until the final step: Alerts system, Signup, Login. For those, please use the older version still.

4. New features: Although most of those are not part of the new version's "switching" timeline, among the new features are, language based search, New tagging and Search mod with added features including replies based search, New board ranking system and much more.

One last note, the categorization of threads/forums on the new is not fully updated due to a mechainsm change. While this has no effect on the system's operation, it will take a while until all new forums are properly categorized. We will release news about that for board owners, when the time comes to release the new board owners' admin panel.

Forumeter - what's hot on the boardscape

Wed Mar 14, 2007 6:55 am (GMT 0)

Author: Support
Subject: Forumeter - what's hot on the boardscape
Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 6:55 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Want to know what the hottest video or news on the boards is today? Well check out forumeter.com to see right now!

Forumeter is a site we built recently which shows the most popular videos from a number of sites such as youtube, metacafe, myspace video, google video and more. Popularity is based on the number of forum disussions about those vids and you will see below each vid on forumeter links back to the forum threads where they are discussed so you can join in the conversation!

Along with video, forumeter also tracks news (bbc, cnn), blogs (techcrunch, lifehacker, mashable, boing boing etc) and even products (newegg) and we'll be adding more sources in the future.

All the items in forumeter are searchable and many are also tagged as you can see from the tagclouds so you can search or browse by tags.

Next to each item you can see thumbs for 'related vids' so you will hopefully discover more cool vids to view as you browse around the site

It's still a work in progress but we hope you like it so far.

International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

Thu Feb 01, 2007 2:53 pm (GMT 0)

Author: Administrator
Subject: International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
Posted: Thu Feb 01, 2007 2:53 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 2

In March 26-28, 2007, a conference about weblogs and social media will take place in Colorado. The conference is named "International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media"
While weblogs, seem to get a prime place in the conference name, we will be there to remind people that the main player in social media was always, and still is, the Boardscape

A little about the conference from the official conference site:

Quote:

Recent years have seen a flourishing of social media - the promise of the WWW coming to fruition. Across the world, individuals can share opinions, experiences and expertise at the push of a button. There has been a fundamental shift thanks to significant advances in the ease of publishing content. Creating web content was for years the domain of tech-savvy people; now the barrier has been torn down.

Perhaps the most visible among the successes of social media in recent years is the blogosphere. Tens of thousands of new blogs are created every day; blog content is becoming ubiquitous, surfacing in news portals, search results and corporate public relations. Even those who are unaware of the blogosphere are still influenced by its content. Although blogs are highly visible currently, other forms of conversational spaces continue to flourish, especially message boards, mailing lists, review sites and Usenet.

Social media covers all forms of sharing: from photos, to videos, to recommendations. In the past few years, many examples of social media have become hugely successful. Flickr is a premier photo sharing site; del.icio.us has become a touchstone for sharing recommendations of websites; Web 2.0 applications in general abound with newcomers in the social media space.

One of the fascinating aspects of social media has been the drive from within to study the ecology as it evolves. People act at once as creators, observers and influencers of the space in which they participate. At the same time, businesses are quickly grasping the potential benefit to attending to the new space of social media. Monitoring the aggregate trends and opinions revealed by social media provides valuable insight to a number of business applications: marketing intelligence, competitive intelligence.

The conference is sure to be an interesting one.

Techcrunch now with forums!

Fri Jan 05, 2007 7:28 am (GMT 0)

Author: Support
Subject: Techcrunch now with forums!
Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 7:28 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Big news on the boardscape AND the blogosphere today as one of the most popular bloggers, Mike Arrington of Techcrunch, has moved into forums now also with the launch of CrunchForums!

It will be interesting to see if other top bloggers follow him to the boards. Either way it is likely to bring more attention to the vast but relatively underhyped boardscape which is good news.

Of course we will be adding CrunchForums to BoardTracker soon.

So what is next from BoardTracker?

Sat Dec 02, 2006 8:37 am (GMT 0)

Author: Support
Subject: So what is next from BoardTracker?
Posted: Sat Dec 02, 2006 8:37 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

As always BoardTracker koalas are hard at work finding the latest threads from the greatest boards in the boardscape and providing an advanced forum search function - both here on boardtracker.com and also through our forum search syndication system powering search on many of the biggest boards out there including boards.ie, bimmerforums.com, disboards.com and many more.

In fact BoardTracker is still the only viable way to search myspace forums despite the just launched 'powered by google' search on myspace!

However, despite BT being soo cool already, its about to get a whole lot better! We're currently working on some major upgrades which will be revealed soon and ensure boardtracker remains at the cutting edge of forum search.

If you submitted a board and its not listed yet dont worry - once we get this upgrade out there we will index all the pending board submissions and provide an even better system for board admins and users to search the boards.

Stay tuned.

Web2con is over... some impressions

Tue Nov 14, 2006 7:03 am (GMT 0)

Author: Administrator
Subject: Web2con is over... some impressions
Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2006 7:03 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

The Web2.0 conference/summit is over and the LaunchPad event was great.
We have launched Klostu.com and are VERY excited about things to come.
In the coming weeks we will roll out the first installations of Klostu with few selected boards and hopefully by January 1st will open it to the wider Boardscape. Stay tuned for news on that..

The conference was good and the exposure we got for the Boardscape is something we are very happy with. With the coming launch of Klostu we are strongly focused on bringing boards and forums to the throne they deserve to sit on. Strangely enough, blogs still get so much attention even though they are simply 5% of what is referred to as "consumer generated media". While very useful and valuable (at least a certain chunk of blogs out there), blogs are not proper for everything and there is a line where blogs end and forums start.. And we want to bring as much of the spotlight there. With the launch of Klostu we want to focus the spotlight on the social supremacy of boards, as a community and networking platform.

We were quite (un)surprised to notice that we were the only players in the Boardscape. That being said, we have seen several interesting players in the social field:

Esnips.com

Sphere

People aggregator

One last meeting I want to mention was with a person named Stowe Boyd (/Message , BlueWhaleLabs). Stowe is a sharp person with a deep, clear and (in my opinion) excellent perception of social web. Stowe coined several terms, among which are "social tools" (coined back in 1999, when people still didn't know what the web will be one day). What we call "social design" Stowe call "Social architecture". What we call "Social space" Stowe call "Social dimension". I actually like the latter quite a lot. Anyway, a person with quite an interesting point of view and a keen insight into the importance of "social architecture" on people's experience with web systems.

More to come on the impressions and outcome of web2.0 conference in the near future.. Stay tuned

Web 2.0 Conference Launchpad - we're in!

Thu Oct 05, 2006 10:20 am (GMT 0)

Author: Support
Subject: Web 2.0 Conference Launchpad - we're in!
Posted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 10:20 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

It's official - we have been selected as one of only 13 companies, from over 200 applicants, to appear in the launchpad event at the influential Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on November 7th, 2006!

We'll finally be unveiling our super cool new product for the boardscape - klostu.com. We have been feverishly toiling away on klostu for a long time now and we're really looking forward to launching at the web2.0 conference which should help bring lots of attention and hype to the world of message boards!

The 'discussion' in discussion forums

Tue Sep 12, 2006 10:19 pm (GMT 0)

Author: Administrator
Subject: The 'discussion' in discussion forums
Posted: Tue Sep 12, 2006 10:19 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

Message boards are long recognized as a place where most of the discussion between people on the web takes place. But how much discussion takes place in the Boardscape? and what are its characteristics?

The first part of a series of articles will explore exactly that aspect of the Boardscape.

While boards vary greatly in most characteristics, be it number of members in the board, age, gender, theme/topic of the board, language, design and even the board software, there are interesting aspects of the discussion on boards that arise from the total of all of the discussions generated in them.

One key factor for a discussion is it's "length". How many exchanges are made in a thread? While a single person starts a thread in a forum, others in the forum can reply to that thread (in most cases). Some threads get no reply, because it calls for no reply or there is no need for one (some board announcements for example), some are looking for information that others can not provide, topic is locked and other reasons. Some threads however generate hundreds or thousands of replies. There are even extreme cases where the number of replies exceed 100,000. Again, a thread with more than 100,000 replies by members of the forum.

The following chart is a histogram of the number of threads with specific replies.
As you can see, the biggest group is the threads without replies. However, it is about 13% of the threads. This means that over 85% of the threads on boards get at least one reply. It can be stated then that boards are not a lonely place like other internet mediums. To emphasize that consider the following fact.. a thread in the Boardscape receives on average about 16 replies.

about 2.5% of the threads get between 51-100 replies, less than 1% between 101-200 and only less than 0.5% receive more than 200 replies.

The following chart illustrates the accumuated number of threads with at least X amount of replies.

As you can see, over 80% of the threads receive up to 15 replies, over 90% of the threads receive up to 26 replies and over 99% receive up to 50 replies. Again, the percentage reaches almost 99.5% at about 175 replies which means that 0.5% of the threads out there receive more than 175 replies. While not a very high number, it does mean that in an average board, one in two hundred threads receive about 200 replies or more.

We should take into consideration though, that the most "value" found in threads is more likely to be found in the shorter threads and towards the beginning of them. The format of board conversation, be it an informative thread (where most of the value is often in the first post) or a question and answer session where most of the value is in the question and the first 10 or 20 answers (granted there are many cases where valuable information can be found in the 100th reply or even 1,000th, although rarely do people take the time to read 1,000 replies).

When applying a "value" factor to the replies, assuming that the value of the first post and 15th reply is 100% and that value degrades by 1% till the 116th post where it stays on 1% value, we can compute the following data..

As might have been expected, almost all the "valuable" posts in the Boardscape are in the first 95 replies. However, 99% of the "valuable" posts are in the first 55 replies and more than 90% of the "valuable" posts are in the first 25 replies.
It is most common that message boards are set to display the first 15 posts in a thread. This means, as the graph illustrates, that over 80% of the "valuable" posts in a board are displayed in the first page of the thread.
Again, to clarify, this is a generalization of the posts' value and it may very well be that some threads have all the value in much later replies.

The above graph might help board owners decide how many posts they want to present per page. To cover more than 90% of the value of the thread in the first page, a board owner will need to display just the first 25 posts. It is safe to say however, that this does not mean that only 10% of people will view the second page of a thread. Thread viewing habits are not covered in this graph. Most likely, curious people or people involved in the specific thread are very likely to follow to the second page in such a scenario. However, given the fact that only 7.5% of the threads out there will actually have a second page if the board chooses to present 25 posts per page, there will be a very low number of second page views.
Bare that in mind when you decide on how many posts per page to present.

New - Related Tags

Mon Sep 04, 2006 8:08 am (GMT 0)

Author: Support
Subject: New - Related Tags
Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 8:08 am (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

We've added a handy new 'related tags' feature recently..

Try a search on boardtracker (tag search or regular search) and you will see on the right column a tag cloud showing related tags. For example click this..

http://www.boardtracker.com/tag/music

You can see in the tag cloud there things like itunes, rock, radio, mp3 etc.

Nifty eh?

Choose a logo for new community forum based service..

Thu Aug 17, 2006 1:00 pm (GMT 0)

Author: Support
Subject: Choose a logo for new community forum based service..
Posted: Thu Aug 17, 2006 1:00 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 2

We are about to launch a new web service that will connect ALL members in all board communities and will encourage people to engage in conversation and friendships and would greatly appreciate your input on this, since the logo and the service is, after all, for you..

We want our logo to reflect the spirit of the site: A fresh and friendly platform for enabling individuals to better form and maintain online communities revolving around all the message boards out there.

So in the spirit of a new and fresh Intenet community based service, which of the three logos do you like best?

Feel free to also include your thoughts and ideas about your favorite logo.

Final touches and color changes may be applied.

Note: you need to login (or signup - its free!) before you can vote.

BoardTracker Search Mod v2 released!

Sun Aug 13, 2006 6:41 pm (GMT 0)

Author: Support
Subject: BoardTracker Search Mod v2 released!
Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 6:41 pm (GMT 0)
Topic Replies: 0

We're pleased to announce the release of version 2 of our super cool integrated forum search mod for boards!

Currently it is available for vbulletin versions 3.5 and 3.6 and will soon also be available for IPB and phpBB.

New features in version 2 include..

Search thread by username
Search in specific forums (set your board id in the control panel for this to work)
Search in related forums (as above)
Search by boardtracker category
Global search option
Block or restrict the built in search to specific usergroups
More integration with vb search links (such as from member profile)
More widgets in the control panel to play with!

Check out our mods page for the latest download links..

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/5/

More good stuff coming soon..