"Web map tracks demand for major news"

"What's next? Web map tracks demand for major news"
By Eric Auchard

"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - It's debatable how big a deal any specific news event is compared to all the other human mayhem that occurs each day. Journalists, editors, historians and the guy at the end of the bar could probably never agree.

A news mapping service introduced on Thursday by Akamai Technologies Inc. promises to give unprecedented insight into the relative hunger that millions of Internet users have to learn of breaking events minute-by-minute."

~ ~ I hope this does not become the dog wagging the tail.
Just because a newsstory is popular, does not mean it is also "news" worthy. ~~ tp~~~

"Akamai, which helps speed delivery of 15 percent of the world's Internet traffic over its network, is looking to count the sum of page requests across 100 major news sites it serves to rank interest in major events on a scale never seen before.

The Akamai Net News Index provides a map of six global regions and measures the current appetite for news relative to average daily demand in terms of millions of visitors to news sites per minute, per week, within each geographic region."

Spikes in traffic can reveal the next wave of news demand.