What are the temperature signs beside each news article?
With hundreds of news stories being posted on N4G each day the more important stories can easily get buried by the less important stories. To solve this problem N4G has invented a temperature system which shows how hot a news story is. When a news story reaches 100° (degree Celsius) its temperature sign will turn red to make it more visible. The temperature of an article does not directly reflect the number hits it gets. The temperature is decided by an algorithm which looks at the combined attention a story gets and the nature of this attention over different time periods. This way the system can predict if a story is hot or not just a few minutes after it has been posted on the site. A system that only relies on how many hits a story gets which is used by most news sites is not as effective as it can go many hours before a story show up as hot. But the reality is that it was “hot” from the minute it was published.
