Who's reading blog articles related to a topic around the world ( Geo-Popularity ) ?

Thats right, we have quietly rolled out this new feature on our 'Pulse' pages. As an example, click over to Brazilian Bikini and check out the "Who's reading about Brazilian Bikini ?" module on the right hand. You will see a list of the top 7 countries from which users are reading articles with the tag 'Brazilian Bikini' in them.

How are we computing this ?
We are leveraging our 'Pulse' infrastructure, see our previous blog posts about 'Pulse' for more info:
Twitter'ize your blog posts contextually in real-time
Pulse is going real-time ...
What is grabbing reader's attention this very minute ?
In a nutshell, when a user reads a blog post on a blog that has a Wowzio widget or a Wowzio beacon installed, we store that info along with the geo-location of the user. We then aggregate all the geo-location info for each blog post in a 'Pulse' topic, to compute Geo-Popularity. This computation is done in real-time, so it is current as of the time you see it.

Another good example is the 'Pulse' page for 'swine flu'. The Geo-Location module on this page lists the countries, where readers are reading blog articles related to 'swine flu'.

We will continue to roll out exciting & useful new features leveraging our Geo-Popularity Platform. If you see bugs, or have some thoughts and ideas around Geo-Popularity, we would love to hear from you, here's the link to our feedback form.

Note: We do not store any personally identifiable info, there is no way for us to go back and figure out who was reading what article, nor can we backtrack to an IP address. This is because what we store is the forward translated location info ( not the IP address ).

Update - June 9th 2009: You might not see this module on all Pulse pages. We only display this module when we have data thats greater than our minimum threshold, so we can compute the distribution by countries with a high level of confidence.

Update - July 14th 2009 : We are rolling back and disabling the 'who's reading about' module on the pulse pages, as it hasn't performed as well. Being a small startup, we have the ability to experiment with new ideas. But when something doesn't work as well as expected, its best to prune it out. It helps keep the product lean, as well as frees up space and time for other ideas.