How would someone go around if they want to build an automated system which shows popular stuff for the day in the country?<p>Like I would assume gather twitter trends from twitter all day, get all articles url from top news sites in that country and check facebook graph for that.
For major news sources:<p>Guess it by correlation. E.g. Google for something that appears on every BBC news page and observe the order google returns the results in to infer popularity. Do that for all the countries major news outlets.<p>Run all the sources through OpenCalais to collect features.<p>Present the features.