Biofuels Digest debuts WyrdChoice™ software: rates PR, articles for reader relevance

Biofuels Digest announced the development of a new predictive software tool, WyrdChoice™, that scores press releases and stories for their potential appeal to the community of investors, producers and policymakers that read about bioenergy.

The WyrdChoice tool is based on an analysis of more than 13 million hits to the Biofuels Digest servers since December 2007. Using more than 7,000 megabytes of server log data, the Digest developed an “importance database” for more than 5,000 keywords relating to biofuels, biomass and bioenergy.

WyrdChoice scores biofuels stories and PR on an index, where a score of 100 is a story, headline or paragraph of average interest to bioenergy readers. The predictive tool will be used to improve Digest stories, and will also be made available to companies utilizing the Biofuels Digest newswire service.

The WyrdChoice tool will be released under license to outside companies later this year, along with a companion tool and database relating to keyword popularity among users of the Google, Yahoo and Live search engines. Keyword databases will be available for 2009 as well as complete historical databases for 2008.

“For any story, or project, or invention,” said Digest editor Jim Lane, “it is important to know as much as possible in advance about the potential interest the public will have regarding an announcement. Also, it’s useful to have a way to quantitatively test out different ways of telling a story. Optimizing text with WyrdChoice can improve the distribution and reception of announcements, and influence how it is indexed and retrieved in the future.”

The Digest archive, which now contains more than 6,000 original articles published since July 2007, forms one of the most extensive databases of professionally-written and edited bioenergy content assembled over the past two years. The archive is now considered by Digest editors to be sufficiently robust to support a reliably predictive tool for bioenergy content development.

WyrdChoice analyzes and score paragraphs based on the density of popular keywords, similar to the techniques used by search engines. The tool has passed all internal tests against press releases submitted by bioenergy companies, as well as against the Biofuels Digest story archive. It will allow writers, communication professionals, and investor relations firms to “pre-analyze” stories and press releases for relevance to the bioenergy community. It will also provide a quantitative tool for use by researchers studying previously-written content.

Articles or press releases that rate highly will do so because they address topics of compelling interest to readers, use more familiar word choices, or cover the subject matter more succinctly than a comparable article.

For example, comparing the source articles for the Top Story for 6/9/2009 – about $57 million in new financing at Solazyme — a story in Greentech Media scored 460, while a competing story in the San Francisco Business Journal scored 553, because the Journal conveyed the essential story points earlier in the story and with greater economy.

The most highly rated source articles for 6/9/09 were a report from Domestic Fuel on the debut of the Plymouth Energy corn ethanol plant (1108), a report on the Colombian ethanol and biodiesel mandates and a flex-fuel car mandate in 2012 (989), a positive report on investment in advanced biuofuels from Investopedia (731), a call for papers for the upcoming Algal Biomass Summit (751), and a report on continuing yield problems with jatropha (548). Source articles for a report on the Dyadic SEC settlement (18), an EPA hearing on the renewable fuel strategy (97), an upcoming address at the UN on “the future of renewable energy” (450) and a report on the Bobcat twin-fuel engine (432) scored lower in the WyrdChoice analysis.

“Keyword density analysis has been around for some time,” said Lane. “The trick is to develop a really robust database of consistently-generated content and search results. After 13 million hits on 6,000 different articles, the Digest is finally there.” The company will seek global protection for its intellectual property.

The Digest’s parent company, Ascension Publishing, has previously released several tools relating to complex search, keyword scoring and recursive data analysis. The company’s “OneSearch” system, launched in 2005, dynamically optimizes web pages in real-time based on capturing inbound search terms used by search engine visitors. OneSearch is not deployed on BiofuelsDigest.com, due to software compliance and IP issues with the Digest’s open-source content management system. The company also developed a user-controlled, keyword-based job listing scoring system in 2003, and a recursive system for analyzing the popularity of relocation destinations in 2004.

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