Digital daily Scroll.in has launched a platform called SocialWire, that curates the top influential news stories of the day. The publication claims that it's using a patent-pending collection of algorithms called the Scroll Machine to identify the most influential news stories from several social media platforms. The software will create a “list of influencers” curated by its editors, and identify the most influential stories by going through ‘hundreds of thousands of users, stories and shares’. Scroll claims that currently, the software analyses over 100,000 posts every day. The top 10 influential stories on SocialWire are updated every few hours, combing through news sources and Twitter. How it works It will use an “influence score” on the scale of 0-100 to calculate the size of the influencer’s audience, news relevance, and the degree to which other influencers re-share their posts. It claims this will help solve the popular-only (most shared) posts problem. The score is normalised by mapping the share and follower count using a sigmoid function. At first glance, the site seems to populate international and Indian news through Twitter influencers and displays a list of influencers on the right hand side, which is mostly politicians and journalists. Clicking a story takes the user to the Twitter influencer’s update or, if the tweet has been retweeted, the original tweet. Machine learning algorithms to generate lists The Scroll Machine, Scroll claims, is a collection of machine learning algorithms which analyse social media posts to identify interesting and important stories. The idea is to automate…
