People

A person is someone credited on a post: its author, a podcast host, or a guest on an episode.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPUTNIK_TOKEN" \
  "https://sputnikintelligence.com/api/v1/people?q=tyler+cowen"

A person detail adds their appearances — which publications they turn up on, in what role, how often, and when last — and what they have been talking about lately. That is the useful shape for "who is this and where do they show up".

The limits, stated plainly

We credit fewer people than actually exist. Feeds are inconsistent about authorship — many carry no author at all, or carry the publication's name in the author field — and podcast guests are only knowable from the transcript. We record a person when we are confident, and stay quiet when we are not.

This matters because of what it means for filtering. There is deliberately no person filter on search. We credit a person on far too few posts for "posts mentioning X, filtered to person X" to be a filter anyone should trust — it would quietly hide most of the answer. A keyword search for the name finds more.

Chronological browse does take person, because that reads the credits directly rather than the search index, and it is honest about what it is: "posts we know this person is on", not "everything they touched".

# Everything mentioning her, which is what you usually want
curl ... "https://sputnikintelligence.com/api/v1/posts/search?q=%22Jane+Smith%22"

# Only the posts we have actually credited her on
curl ... "https://sputnikintelligence.com/api/v1/posts?person=<slug>"

Roles

A person appears in a role per post: author, host, or guest. The same person can be a host on one show and a guest on another, which is exactly what makes appearances worth reading — it is how you find who moves between which conversations.

Duplicates

A person who publishes under two spellings, or as both "J. Smith" and "Jane Smith", can end up as two records. We merge these continuously, by hand and with model help, but a large corpus always has some in flight. If you find a pair that matters to you, tell us and we will merge them.