hotdoing

Whenever there’s breaking news, savvy web users turn to Twitter for the first hints of what might be going on.

It happened with yesterday’s crash landing of flight 1549, it happened with the Mumbai attacks, the Continental Airlines jet that skidded off the runway, the California wildfires and so on.

Twitter is a fantastic place to find breaking news, but Twitter posts are short and sometimes ill-informed. Or even wrong. So, while Twitter is an amazing tool for finding the story, it isn’t the best place to get the whole story.

For comprehensiveness, most of us turn to traditional news outlets, such as those aggregated by Google News. But Google News relies on algorithms to rank stories, and while the algorithms are pretty good, they aren’t necessarily as fast as the news.

That’s why Yahoo BOSS engineer Vik Singh created TweetNews. TweetNews takes Yahoo’s news results and compares them to emerging topics on Twitter, in effect using what’s most popular on Twitter as an index for determining the importance of news stories.

In other words, TweetNews uses Twitter to rank stories that are so new they may not have enough inbound links for algorithm-based ranking systems to prioritize them.

The result is a search engine mashup that tracks breaking news stories ranked by Twitter search results, offering faster updates, better relevance and more in-depth coverage than either source by itself.

In a blog post explaining the ideas behind TweetNews, Singh outlines the frustration many felt when searching for news on the Mumbai attacks: “Twitter messages were providing incredible focus on the important subtopics that had yet to become popular in the traditional media… what I found most interesting… was that news articles did exist on these topics, but just weren’t valued highly enough yet.”

That inspired Singh to create the TweetNews mashup, combining the real-time search Yahoo’s BOSS tools with the freshness of Twitter. As an added bonus each story listed in TweetNews’ results also shows the relevant tweets, which themselves often have additional links. A quick search this morning for “flight 1549″ yielded seven unique links from just the top result.

TweetNews is not only a fantastic resource, but might well be the best mashup we’ve ever seen. The remarkable part is that Singh was able to create it with less than one hundred lines of code — a testament to the power of Yahoo Boss and APIs like Twitter’s.

And don’t look to TweetNews to be the final word on using Twitter to prioritize other web content. As Singh says, the idea “definitely deserves more exploration.” To that end, the source code is available for download and we’ll be sure to let you know if we see any more interesting examples.

A well-known financial news aggregator is being ordered by a federal judge to delay publication of prominent financial analysts’ buy and sell recommendations to allow the well-to-do the first crack at capitalizing on that trading research.

The 3-year-old litigation, brought by Barclays Capital, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and others, rests on the so-called “hot news” doctrine the Supreme Court first recognized in a 1918 case concerning the unauthorized and immediate republication of wire service reports.

A New York federal judge said Theflyonthewall.com breached the doctrine, which allows suits for re-reporting time sensitive “hot news.” Research that Theflyonthewall.com re-posted or alluded to on its site was designated for the banks’ clients that earn the firms not less than $50,000 to $100,000 in trading commissions yearly, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote ruled.

Thursday’s ruling comes as rightsholders are invoking the hot news doctrine to counter a swell of news regurgitation sites. In July, for example, The Associated Press defeated All Headline News in a court battle requiring the aggregator to stop rewriting and publishing AP stories.

Theflyonthewall.com, which has deals with Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and about 5,000 paying clients in all, claimed it obtained the research through reporting, by having “hefty relationships with people in the know.” The New Jersey company claimed that, since at least 2006, it was a legitimate media outlet in a case weighing how far researchers can go to block redistribution of their findings and conclusions.

Judge Cote tipped the scales of justice on the side of the banks and their clients. The ruling, which is being appealed, could have ramifications for other real-time, financial news sites.

“We believe that the decision is at variance with existing case law, and will appeal the decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals,” Theflyonthewall.com’s attorney, Glenn Ostrager, said in a Friday e-mail. “We fully expect that the financial press will vigorously support Theflyonthewall with amicii briefs to the Circuit Court on the grounds that the recommendations are news which the financial press regularly reports.”

Theflyonthewall.com’s practices, the judge wrote, were interfering with the banks’ ability to profit (.pdf) from their research. The banks’ clients were also being harmed by not getting exclusive, pre-market access to market-moving news, Cote wrote.

“The firms’ intellectual capital, and their substantial investment in producing high-quality equity research is ultimately justified only by the role that research plays in driving commission revenue,” Cote ruled. “The greater the perception of value, the more that clients are willing to pay to gain and retain access to that research by directing their trading business to the firm.”

But Cote did not altogether bar Theflyonthewall.com from distributing the banks’ findings.

She wrote that the hot news doctrine, in combination with the “goal” of intellectual property, “is to provide an incentive for the production of socially useful information without either under- or overprotecting the efforts to gather such information.”

For research acquired before the market’s 9:30 a.m. East Coast opening, Theflyonthewall.com must wait until at least 10 a.m. before it publishes that information, the judge said. It must also wait two hours to publish the banks’ buy-and-sell reports it obtains during the intra-day trading cycle.