Talked about this week
Terms used by more blogs in the last 7 days than in the 12 weeks before, ranked by breadth times surprise. Each blog counts once per term.
Window
Counting
News outlets and publications are left out by default: a quarter of the raw list was newspapers.
#
Term
Blogs
Baseline
Lift
Headline
Method
How a term is ranked
score = breadth × lift breadth = blogs using the term this window / blogs publishing this window lift = breadth this window / breadth in the baseline
A term has to be at least two and a half times as broad as its baseline, and used by a floor of blogs rather than a handful, so an ordinary word drifting from one week to the next does not read as news. Function words, generic headline verbs and the calendar are dropped before counting: months and weekdays trend every week by definition. A source counts only if it published before the window opened, so a blog new to the corpus cannot read as a spike.