What’s Newsworthy?

I developed and manage a web site that deals with health care standards. One of the features that I threw in to the site was the ability to fetch health-related news articles from a handful of news sources, so that there’s a rolling “top stories” section.

The weird part is that I also extract keywords from the site — usually keywords that the original news source originally identified. And I have a tag cloud that shows me the relative importance of those keywords over the last three months.

As of today, I’m currently seeing the following top keywords:

• cancer
• children
• doctors
• drugs
• health care
• medicine
• mental health
• obesity
• ontario
• research
• workout

There’s a part of me that’s just boggled that obesity is on this list and, say, HIV isn’t.

Mirrored from Under the Beret.