RIAI — Real-Time Internet Attention Index

How to read this page

Attention

A 0–1 score for how unusual a topic's activity is right now — not how big it is. Each hour, a topic's edit counts, article counts and post counts are compared against what that same topic normally does at that same hour of day over the past week. Matching its own normal scores near zero; running about two standard deviations above it scores around 0.5, and further above that climbs toward 1.

So a small topic doing ten times its usual traffic will outrank a famous one having an ordinary day. A high score means "unusually busy for itself", never "most popular".

The four sources are weighted Wikipedia 40%, news 35%, Reddit 20%, search 5% (defaults; set in config.yaml). Search is not implemented and contributes nothing, so in practice scores top out near 0.95. A topic seen in only a handful of events is marked ~.

Within Wikipedia, reads count for far more than edits. Reads are hundreds of thousands of people opening an article; an edit count is a handful of people working on it, and it is capped so that editing activity alone cannot carry a topic to the top of this page.

Some topics have no usable history to compare against — brand new, or so steady that they have no normal variation. Those are ranked against everything else active at that moment instead, and capped at half the range, so a topic we cannot call unusual never outranks one we can.

Momentum

Whether a topic is still climbing or already past its peak. It is the current attention score minus that topic's own recent smoothed average, so it asks "is right now busier than the last few hours were?" rather than comparing against other topics.

▲ rising · ▼ fading · — holding steady. A topic can have high attention and negative momentum at the same time: still busy, but quieter than it just was. Brand-new topics sit near zero until they have enough history to be compared against.

The 24h graph

The topic's attention score at every scoring run over the last 24 hours, oldest on the left. It is there to show the shape of a run — one clean spike, a slow build, or a jagged on-and-off pattern.

Each line is scaled to its own highest and lowest point, so heights are not comparable between rows: a dramatic-looking peak in one row may be a far smaller move than a gentle rise in another. A flat line means the score did not change, or there is not yet enough history.

Emerging & Anomaly Z

A topic is flagged emerging when its current attention is at least 2.5 standard deviations above its own attention at this hour on previous days — that multiple is the Anomaly Z column. It needs at least six prior samples to qualify, which is why genuinely new events often take several hours to appear here.