Where Pulse listens
Pulse doesn't trust any single feed. Every day it pulls from 21 independent signal families spanning four kinds of evidence: what Australia is talking about, what it's quietly searching, what it's actually doing, and what's coming next. When the same story surfaces in more than one of these, that's a pulse worth your attention.
What people are saying
Live conversation: the fastest, noisiest layer. Strong on emotion and memes, weak on staying power.
💬
Reddit
Hot posts across 10 Australian and culture subreddits, scored on real upvotes and comments.
🦋
Bluesky
The open social graph's What's Hot feed: early chatter before it reaches the big platforms.
▶️
YouTube
Trending videos in Australia via the official Data API.
📡
Meltwater
Professional media listening: brand and culture keyphrases and entities across news and social.
🌟
Creator watchlist
TikTok and Instagram posts from a 50-talent watchlist, flagged when a post dramatically beats that creator's own baseline.
What people are searching
Curiosity: what people look up when nobody's watching. Less performative than what they post.
🔍
Google Trends
Breakout searches across AU, US and UK, refreshed through the day.
📌
Pinterest Trends
Australia's fastest-growing Pinterest searches with week- and month-over-month growth: what people are planning and buying toward, straight from Pinterest's own Trends API.
📖
Wikipedia
Day-over-day pageview spikes: the internet's curiosity meter for people, places and moments.
🤖
AI searchopt-in
A model-estimated probe of what Australians are asking AI assistants.
What people are doing
Revealed behaviour: charts and purchases. People doing, not just talking. Hard to fake.
🎧
Audio charts
Apple Music and Apple Podcasts AU, snapshotted daily so we can see movers, not just leaders.
🎵
ARIA Charts
Australia's official singles and albums charts: the canonical record of what the country is buying and streaming, snapshotted daily for movers.
🎬
Screen
TMDB trending film and TV: what's actually being watched and tracked.
🍿
JustWatch
Australia's trending streaming titles, with Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb scores attached, so we see what's both watched and well-reviewed.
📊
TV ratings
Australian broadcast and BVOD audience numbers via TV Tonight: the overnight and weekly winners on the big screens.
🎮
Gaming
Steam most-played and Twitch top games: where attention sits for hours, not seconds.
😹
Meme formats
Know Your Meme and Giphy trending: the templates and formats spreading right now.
🛍️
Social commerce
Amazon AU bestseller movers (eBay, Threads and Depop available on request): trends people are spending money on.
📺
PeerLogix
Streaming-demand reads from PeerLogix's CEO on Threads: which shows are climbing, plateauing, or over-indexed versus their press coverage.
What's coming
The anticipatory layer: signals that arrive before the moment, plus the feeds that spot it earliest.
🗓️
Horizon
Public holidays, sport fixtures, film and game releases, and weather extremes, scored by how close they are.
🚀
Tech culture
Hacker News and Product Hunt: products and ideas before they become trends.
📰
AU media
44 verified RSS feeds, one per masthead, spanning news, business, youth, fashion, music, gaming, tech and satire.
How it comes together
Each source is fetched daily and normalised into the same event shape, then deduplicated so nothing is counted twice. Chart sources (music, screen, gaming, Wikipedia) keep a full daily snapshot of their whole chart, so Pulse knows whether something is new, climbing, plateauing or fading, and how many days it has been on the chart.
A synthesis model then reads the day's evidence with a brief calibrated on Poem's own human-written Pulse decks: it clusters corroborating signals across sources, ranks them, and writes 4 to 6 pulse items, each one traced back to the raw events it came from. Cross-source confirmation beats raw volume; one platform shouting is noise, three platforms whispering the same thing is a signal.