I found it difficult to scour the web to find the most shared links when building trendn.com. You will find that the top news sites get the most shares, and the little guys never get to the top (unless your scoring takes that into account).
Thanks! Still a work in progress but the scoring is based on social sharing data as well as how long ago it was determined to be trending. Social sharing data includes facebook (likes, comments, shares), tweets including the URL, diggs, votes on reddit, delicious bookmarks, HN (points, comments), and a few other metrics.
https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223132567-Can-T...