Building on our last update, we wanted to continue to explore different ways to help track and promote  common themes occurring across the gay blogosphere, often referred to as Memes (definition of Meme). We already have the tags page, and although useful, it lacks context (if you’re busy browsing for stories, the last thing you’d want is to be moved away to a dedicated tags page where your current context is lost.)

Last night we released our Meme Explorer bar, which is now available at the top of all main section pages across the site. This new feature analyses all stories in a given category published over the last week. It then attempts to identify common themes, threads and topics discussed, then ranking them in order of activity. The most popular re-occurring themes appear in the new ‘Popular this week’ bar as shown below:

This particular example is taken today from the news section - where this week the hot topics have been Brad Pitt, who reportedly donated $100,000 to support gay marriage, Sarah Palin and Barack Obama.