I have mentioned before a book I wrote in 2007 called Information Trapping. It was about using tools like keyword-based RSS feeds and Google Alerts to curate content across the Web. Fast forward 18 years later and, while keyword-based news RSS feeds are still useful, I’m finding Google Alerts increasingly clogged with junk. General topical monitoring is also getting more difficult; unless something has regular news coverage, new and real information about it can tend to get lost in a sea of AI-generated garbage. That’s why I’m trying to idea of monitoring Wikipedia categories to watch topics that aren’t easily defined by keyword-based RSS feeds.

I’m using Google Sheets / Google Apps Script as a platform so I can get a daily emailed report without having to build any infrastructure. I’m monitoring about 20 categories; here’s a sample:

YouTubers from North Carolina
YouTubers with one million subscribers
Companies based in Silicon Valley
Companies based in Mountain View, California
Companies based in Palo Alto, California
Companies based in San Jose, California
Companies based in Santa Clara, California
Companies based in Sunnyvale, California

So instead of trying to figure out how I can monitor Silicon Valley companies on the general web, I’m picking out Wikipedia categories where they’re located. Instead of trying to put together the perfect Google Alert that brings me news on YouTubers without an accompanying barge-load of dreck, I’m watching some YouTube categories.

The program (Google Apps script) runs every morning and analyzes each page in the category (up to 5000.) Each page has the previous day’s views checked against a median of the last 30 days. (You can adjust that.) The program identifies pages that have an x-sized spike in page views (also adjustable), gathers them into the list, and sends them as a report. Here’s an example of one of the report items:

The Google search goes to a Google News search for that topic over the last 24 hours. I’m not entirely satisfied with that and might stretch it a little.

Sometimes it’s very clear why a topic jumped into the public spotlight; a celebrity has a baby, for example, or a company makes a breakthrough. For the “Cringe Culture” page, though, I’m a bit flummoxed. There was an article on NPR about cringe culture five days ago, but I can’t find why the topic would get the page view zoomies days later. Going from under 200 page views regularly to over 11,000 means something, though. If I can unravel that then maybe I can find another resource to monitor audience attention.