Where the Attention figure comes from
How many tracked topics are departing from their own normal, and how far those particular topics have gone. Topics behaving normally are counted in neither and cannot move the figure.
How it is put together
The subjects
A few hundred subjects, each with its name, the other ways it is written, and the words that must not be mistaken for it. The list is maintained by hand and is a stated choice rather than a discovery.
How a subject is recognised in a piece of text — the aliases, the guards against a near miss, and the threshold below which an item is left unattributed — is a method of its own and has no account on this site yet.
If this produces nothingA subject nobody listed is absent from these figures rather than quiet in them, and nothing in the arithmetic can tell those two apart.
The counts
Discussion items on the platforms that may be read, page views on the encyclopaedia articles that stand for a subject, and reads of this product's own pages. Each is counted per subject and per period, and a period that was watched and held nothing is written down as such.
In full: Discussion and news are counted separately
If this produces nothingA source that goes quiet writes no period at all rather than a zero. A zero here always means a period somebody watched, which is the difference between a quiet subject and a source that stopped.
How unusual each count is
Every count is compared with that subject's own recent history on that source, and the result is expressed in units that mean the same thing for a subject barely mentioned and a subject discussed constantly.
In full: Turning one source's activity into a score
If this produces nothingA subject with too little history, or too little activity to say anything about, gets no score rather than a weak one, and contributes to nothing downstream.
One figure per subject
The sources are pooled by kind and blended, with news coverage held to a share it cannot exceed however many outlets report, and this product's own traffic held to a smaller one still.
If this produces nothingA subject whose every source produced no score gets no figure, rather than being published at the middle of the scale as though it had been measured and found ordinary.
This figure
Subjects sitting unusually high or unusually low for themselves are counted, and how far those particular subjects have departed is averaged with the extremes trimmed. Subjects behaving normally take no part, which is what stops the size of the subject list from moving the figure.
In full: Attention — how much of the tracked world is unusually active
If this produces nothingIf no subject could be scored, the figure is not published at all rather than shown as the middle of its scale.
Attention — how much of the tracked world is unusually active
Each topic's attention figure is calculated first, against that topic's own history on each source. A topic above the upper line below is counted as unusually active for itself; one below the lower line is counted as unusually quiet. A topic between them is ordinary and takes no part in this figure at all.
Two quantities are measured from that. **Total elevation** is how far past the upper line the departing topics sit, added up rather than averaged — so a hundred subjects behaving normally contribute exactly nothing and cannot move it. **The loudest few** is the same measure over the three most unusual subjects alone, which exists because no figure that treats two hundred subjects alike can show a single extraordinary one: that subject is one of two hundred whatever the weights are.
Each of the two is compared with its own recent past before they are combined, weighted as below. Comparing them first is what makes the weights mean what they say — the two run at very different sizes, and adding them raw would make one of them the whole figure.
An unusually quiet world needs no separate term: it is one whose total elevation is far below what it usually is, which the comparison says on its own.
What this does not say
- **It was an average of every tracked topic's figure until method version 2.0.0, and that made it partly a measurement of this product's own topic list.** Adding a hundred ordinary topics to the list pulled the average toward the middle, and retiring a few pushed it away, with nothing in the world having changed. Ignoring the topics that are behaving normally is what removes that. Figures published under the older version are on a different scale and are not points on the same series.
- **Between 2.0.0 and 5.0.0 it barely moved at all, and that was a defect rather than a calm world.** The two halves it was built from were subtracted from one another and both sat at their ceiling on almost every reading, so they cancelled: measured over a week in September 2026 the published figure never left a five-point stretch around the middle of its hundred, and an event taking one subject to the top of its own scale moved it by under half a point. Figures published under those versions are not points on the same series as these.
- It is built from relative figures, so it cannot say how much attention there is in absolute terms. If the departing topics are small ones, this still reads high — they are unusual *for themselves*.
- It describes the topics this product tracks, which are a chosen set. See the scope note below.
- More attention is neither good nor bad. Nothing here reads a high figure as alarming.
Numbers this uses 6 constants
| Value | What it does | How it was arrived at |
|---|---|---|
5 index pointsattention.significantChange | How far a topic's attention figure has to move over a day before that topic is counted as one whose attention is shifting. | A reasoned choice with no observed distribution behind it yet. Read it as a stated position, not a measurement. |
65 index pointsattention.elevatedThreshold | Where a topic stops being ordinary and starts counting as unusually active for itself. | A reasoned choice with no observed distribution behind it yet. Read it as a stated position, not a measurement. |
35 index pointsattention.subduedThreshold | The same line in the other direction — where a topic counts as unusually quiet for itself. It is the same distance from the middle as the line above, so an unusually quiet world reads as the mirror image of an unusually busy one. | A reasoned choice with no observed distribution behind it yet. Read it as a stated position, not a measurement. |
3 topicsattention.tailTopics | How many of the loudest subjects the second half of this figure is taken over. It exists because no figure that treats two hundred subjects alike can show a single extraordinary one: that subject is one of two hundred whatever the weights are. | A reasoned choice with no observed distribution behind it yet. Read it as a stated position, not a measurement. |
0.65 share of the departureattention.pressureWeight | How much *how much of the tracked world is unusual* counts toward the figure. | A reasoned choice with no observed distribution behind it yet. Read it as a stated position, not a measurement. |
0.35 share of the departureattention.tailWeight | How much *how extreme the loudest few subjects are* counts toward it. Weighted below the half above, so one extraordinary subject on an otherwise ordinary day is a visible move rather than a decisive one. | A reasoned choice with no observed distribution behind it yet. Read it as a stated position, not a measurement. |
What this product does not claim
Stated positions about what this figure is, not a list of things not built yet.
This describes the topics and questions this product tracks, not the world
Every figure here is an average over a chosen set: a few hundred topics with names somebody wrote down, and the forecast questions that passed an admission policy. Nothing in the arithmetic knows what it is missing.
This figure compares a topic with itself, not with other topics
The attention figure is a topic's current level against that same topic's own recent history. It is not a share of anything, not an estimate of how many people are involved, and not a position in a ranking of topics.
Volume of coverage is capped and can never carry the figure
How much was published about a topic and how much the public discussed it are different measurements, and this product does not let the first stand in for the second. The volume of news and official coverage has a fixed maximum share of the attention figure, and that share never grows.
Some of this figure is people reading this site, and it is capped for that reason
Visits to this site's own topic and question pages count towards attention, alongside the outside sources. That is stated here rather than left to be discovered, because it is the one input this product itself produces: what appears prominently here gets read more here, and a figure that let that run would report the product's own choices back as public attention.
The rest of it
- This figure inside the full methodology, with every method it draws on
- Where the Forecast Movement figure comes from
- Where the Mood figure comes from
- Where the Uncertainty figure comes from
- Where the Turbulence figure comes from
- Where the Disagreement figure comes from
- The same methodology as JSON
- Which sources this system reads, and on what terms