Real-time Reports on News Consumption Around the World

Via New Media Musings, a blog written by JD Lasica, I learned about Akamai's Net Usage Index-News. More info from ZDNet:

"Akamai has created a way for measuring where web surfers are focused en masse at any given time among 100 major online news sites. The Akamai Net News Index offers a near real-time zeitgeist meter on what news is attracting the most interest, broken out by major regions of the world.

This is really cool. It amounts to a "most read" attention gauge that is constantly refreshed and can be localized. No more guessing about what people are really interested in, and how they invest their attention."

It's updated about every five minutes. This is what was showing up when I was reading it:

What this data is expressing is the numbers of page requests per minute as collected by Akamai from 100 major news sites. According to Reuters, some of these sites include "the U.S.-centred NBC, XM Satellite Radio and ESPN, LeMonde in France and the global audiences of CNN.com and Reuters.com."

Related:

• More web zeitgeists to see what's hot and what's popular on the Web at any given time.
• Top Ten Ways to Monitor World News: Find the news you want on the Web.