A part of NewsGator that's less obvious than our enterprise social computing products, RSS readers, and widgets is our data services. In short, at NewsGator we want to know what people think about content. For example, without being overly intrusive (we don’t collect any personal information), we can track what people are reading, watching and responding to. We like to infer from implicit iteraction what people think about the different stories they read, the videos they watch , what they share with friends and what just gets passed on without notice.

Throughout the millions of NewsGator desktop clients, mobile applications and widgets, NewsGator is watching the content that people read, and keeping track of their interactions around that content. If you click on a headline to read a full article or click a play button in a video widget that tells us the content is interesting. If you email it, rate it, mark it read in NetNewsWire or clip it in FeedDemon, all of these events represent varying levels of attention around a story.

The aggregate collection of these attention events loosely represents the reach and interaction of content, and are represented in two calculated scores:

• Post Score: this is a metric that represents the activity around a particular piece of content. There is no limit or range applied, larger numbers represent more attention

• Feed Score: since each feed is made up of individual articles, the feedscore is generated based on the strength of the individual articles in the feed. We also layer in the subscriber count to that feed, making the feedscore not just about the activity, but also the reach of the source. This metric also does not fit into a range; larger numbers simply mean more activity and more subscribers

To learn more about NewsGator's data services, click here.

In an interesting new partnership, fellow Colorado company -- Filtrbox -- announces this morning that they have turned to NewsGator to boost the quality of the proactive market intelligence it provides to sales forces, executives, marketers and investors. 

Filtrbox scours millions of online sources, both mainstream and new media, and delivers high quality business intelligence tailored for each client.  As a result, organizations make better decisions based on breaking news, trends and competitive happenings.

With help from NewsGator, Filtrbox's product will become even more compelling: they now use our metadata based on over 50 million Internet user actions every month.  As Ari Newman, founder and president of Filtrbox, explains, "We analyze massive amounts of information to ensure the relevance and value of content we deliver" and now that "NewsGator has just added attention metadata to the mix, we can use that to further boost the information used by FiltrRank to rate articles."

Flitrbox has turned to NewsGator since we operate the largest repository of free internet content.  Indeed, NewsGator adds 9 million new articles to our repository every day, indexing and aggregating 4.6 million separate feeds and archiving four years of historical content!  And, because millions of people interact with NewsGator products each day, we are able to supply Filtrbox with millions of pieces of metadata on user actions. 

As Walker Fention, GM of NewsGator's Media & Data Services explains, "NewsGator's Data Services' unique insight into how audiences are responding to content gives Filtrbox clients more value out of their intelligence information." 

You can learn more about NewsGator Data Services here.