The new version of Liquida combines blogs, “traditional” news sources and tweets to provide our users with the opportunity to really explore the most talked-about topics online.

A wide range of new features, beginning from our completely redesigned home page, contributes to making Liquida an unmanned outpost in the news galaxy that lets the web speak for itself.

It is now much easier to get a grasp on what has the blogosphere abuzz and to combine those opinions with a complete perspective on the news stories or events that have inspired discussions and comments.

Our brand new search page makes it even easier to find relevant, quality content – be it a blog post, image or video – on virtually any topic. Our search results can not only be filtered by time frame, but also by where they come from (our sources span the entire globe), and how they were written.

Thanks to semantic analysis we actually analyze the sentiment of a post, meaning that we can measure the mood of a post and the author’s perspective on a specific topic by analyzing the adjectives present in a text and weighing them appropriately.

In addition, Liquida Trends traces the most recurring words in the blogosphere and their ranking over time. These keywords are divided into Tags, People, Brands, Places and can be sorted by category.

Our Video page, an additional new feature, showcases the most linked videos in Liquida, while the Forum ranks and highlights the most discussed and commented news and posts.

We’re really excited about these changes and are looking forward to your feedback, enjoy!

Since the beginning we decided to use opensource platforms and programming languages as we believe that free-licensed software and languages developed by open groups guarantee efficiency and reliability.

For these reasons, we opted for a LAMP platform: Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database, and Python and Php scripting.

Herewith you find a simple overview of Liquida core processes, our IT team is always happy to share technical suggestions or receive feedback from you, so please don’t hesitate to contact us.

1. Blogs enter our directory

Blogs are added to Liquida either because they have been submitted online or because they have been selected by our staff. In both cases, every blog is assigned a score by our editorial staff. This score will, among other things, affect blog and blog posts positioning in our search results.
For blog directory management our editorial staff uses a backoffice interface written in Php, powered with an Apache server and a backend MySQL database.

2. New blogs contents are retrieved via RSS Feed

Our proprietary “patrol” algorithm – written in Python and executed on several machines – periodically goes through the full Liquida blogs database and starts searching for new content.

The RSS retrieval system tries to find XML content variations, acting in the least intrusive and most bandwidth-safe way, for example analyzing HTTP response headers without downloading unuseful duplicate information.

Only if our “patrol” finds that the XML content of a given blog has been modified, the “patrol” algorithm retrieves the entire RSS file and stores it in the backend MySQL database.

3. Posts optimization

The most complex part of the job is achieved by another proprietary system – also written in Python – that processes new posts that have been inserted in the backend MySQL database by the “patrol” software.

This service – higly parallelized in order to avoid any bottleneck effect – is structured in several dozen of stages that carry out specific processing operations.

The stages include analyzing the XML structure of RSS feeds (parsing), verifying which posts are already present in the archive, retrieving (by sending an HTTP request to the appropriate server) the page complete with images, heuristically analyzing the page template, automatically exctracting tags using open source natural language processing libraries, and the excluding obscene content.

The post is now transformed in a hash table and stored in the backend database.

4. Data indexing

Liquida indexing and search engine is based on the open source engine Lucene, interfaced via Solr (executed by Apache Tomcat).

A Python application, named mysql2solr, extracts each post information, processes the data, and passes it to Solr/Lucene for indexing.

Liquida has three core indexes: one for posts, that returns posts and images that match the search criteria, one for blogs and one for tags, which provides tags related to the search keys. Indexed contents can be searched on a chronological base and, most important, using content-relevant custom-built query functions.

5. The web site

Liquida front-end is developed in Php, using CodeIgniter as Php framework and MooTools as Javascript framework.

The site interfaces directly with Solr/Lucene, that returns information in serialized array that is easily elaborated through Php, without going through MySQL, which is only used in the backend.

Front-end Php platform and some Python applications are performance-optimized using Memcached as a caching system.

Liquida blog runs on WordPress.

In order to optimize our developers team’s work the code is versioned with Subversion, using Eclipse as main editor.

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- How does a blog enter Liquida?

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1. They can be selected by our editorial staff which peruses the blogosphere daily searching for hidden gems, fresh content, high-quality blogs.

2. They are submitted online by Liquida users or by bloggers. Anyone can submit a blog for insertion, therefore if you find that your blog is already in our directory it is quite likely that one of your readers has submitted it to us. A submitted blog must fulfill specific technical and qualitative criteria to enter our directory.

Related Posts:
- How to appear in or remove yourself from Liquida
- What parameters must a blog fulfill in order to be included in Liquida?

If your blog is already in Liquida, it’s either because our editorial staff have choosen it or because it was submitted by one or more of your readers.

Our mission is to give value and visibility to blogosphere quality content that might get lost in the ever-growing Web 2.0 world, boosting quality blogs reputation and visits, so:

1. we only include blogs that publish their feeds and are visible to search engines, this means for us that the author would be happy to appear in aggregators or blog search engines.

2. We always publish post abstracts, all posts are only showed as a preview linking to the blog of origin.

If a blogger does not want to appear in Liquida he can request the removal of their blog and we will comply within 48 working hours.

It must have a working RSS Feed, filled with photographic or textual content. It must be frequently updated with original and high-quality content, written in correct English and free of obscene or offensive material.

Related Posts:
- How does a blog enter Liquida?
- How to appear in or remove yourself from Liquida

These new content producers, these prosumers who merge the role of content producers and consumers, are the founding base the Web was built on. Since the beginning, the Internet has been animated by websites created by single individuals rather than publishers or institutions. This, combined with interactivity, is what distinguishes the Net from any other media, and is its driving force.

Taking into consideration user-generated content and the prosumer phenomenon in their widest sense, we can treat as prosumer any user that produces content, be it an ad, a blog post or a product put up for auction. Most blogs and services such as online photo albums or eBay, YouTube and Craigslist can be included in the prosumer phenomenon. The content produced by this relevant percentage of internet users is characterized by great variety, quality and, thus, value.

The Internet has demonstrated that millions of people throughout the Globe want to express themselves, share experiences and create content value, but also that these people develop hundreds of thousands of niches of interests, niches that usually find a number of followers far greater than the number of those who created them.
Until recently there were doubts if these niches could find an adequate space and visibility. In an economic system based on the 80-20 rule, the widespread belief was that people were interested in a narrow range of topics, that only certain mainstream TV shows, movies or musicians could find success. The Web has debunked this rule, creating its own curve, which we now know as the Long Tail.

The Web has become increasingly entrenched in our collective consciousness giving us access to an almost infinite amount of information. It has shaped our outlook, and is the great cultural revolution of our time. But now a new concern emerges. Is the Internet becoming a finite space?

With this online content growing rate, the Internet, considered until now as the only media with limitless space and influence, may reach its limit. It’s not only a technological or infrastructural matter but, more importantly, it’s a question of content value chain. Here’s what we mean.

We know that roughly 90% of internet users find what they are looking for using a search engine (mainly Google). We also know that they normally browse through the first three pages of search results. Today the prosumer’s main concern is to appear in this limited range of results. With the constant user-generated-content growth this challenge will become harder and harder, increasing the risk that most of the user-generated-content will no longer reach its audience.
This could create a growing frustration among prosumers and, in the end, the prosumer phenomenon could either die out or at least stop growing.

The next great challenge is to find, select, filter and emphasize high-value independent content within this growing mass of information. It’s a new challenge due to the evolution in Web usage, boosted by the increasing number of instruments that facilitate content creation, publishing and sharing.

Some existing approaches seem promising. Digg, Delicius, and other folksonomy based approaches come to mind. We deeply agree with them: users must be engaged in the process of discovering, filtering and valorizing content.

This is where Liquida comes in, as a new content value boosting tool, based on a proprietary approach involving content treatment, natural language processing and semantic technologies, driven by an original human approach for qualitative criteria definition and implementation and a professional editorial structure for content valorization and presentation, an innovative approach that will hopefully bring us closer to overcoming this challenge and ensuring that quality and value will not be lost.

With Liquida, global bloggers are protagonists in a free-speech environment and in a quality-based content value chain.
Liquida lets bloggers showcase their qualities and become increasingly relevant, gaining reputation within the blogosphere.