How to notice unusual news activity

Posted by ??iu on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by ??iu
Published on 2010-06-11T15:03:14Z Indexed on 2010/06/11 15:13 UTC
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Suppose you were able keep track of the news mentions of different entities, like say "Steve Jobs" and "Steve Ballmer".

What are ways that could you tell whether the amount of mentions per entity per a given time period was unusual relative to their normal degree of frequency of appearance?

I imagine that for a more popular person like Steve Jobs an increase of like 50% might be unusual (an increase of 1000 to 1500), while for a relatively unknown CEO an increase of 1000% for a given day could be possible (an increase of 2 to 200). If you didn't have a way of scaling that your unusualness index could be dominated by unheard-ofs getting their 15 minutes of fame.

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