大象传媒

The 大象传媒 Sound Index

• Darren Waters
• 20 May 08, 13:04 GMT

I've just stumbled across a cool 大象传媒 website, thanks to . (I know, the irony).

The Sound Index produces a top 1,000 index of the most talked about music artists by crawling the discussions taking place on Bebo, Google Groups, iTunes, MySpace and YouTube.

The service works by leveraging technology developed by IBM at its labs.

According to IBM: "A variety of content ingestion techniques are employed to continuously gather user comments, listens, views and other interest indicators across multiple sources on the internet.

"This content is then processed through an analytics chain, which is comprised of advanced linguistic and natural language processing (NLP) technology. Comments are transliterated, de-spammed, and analyzed for relevance, and listens and views are aggregated at the band and individual track level."

In other words, the more references, posts, views, plays of a particular artist, the higher ranking it gets in the Sound Index.

At the moment Coldplay is at the top of the index. The index accompanies a 大象传媒 programme on weekends.

TechCrunch appeals to the 大象传媒 to release the data it processes to create the index back into the web so that other firms can use it.

What do you think?