Development Seed Blog

Uses the BuzzMonitor as an Example of Good Filtering Tools for Development Agencies

Ethan Zuckerman, the man behind Global Voices Online and working with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, kicked off the last day of the Web2forDev conference yesterday here in Rome with a great presentation.

He had many great points on how organizations need to look at the web as an ecosystem, where websites are not stand alone pieces but are interconnected to everything else online. And that their communications plans need to look at it this way too. Ethan got straight to the point by saying, "You can't go to a party and stand in a corner and expect eveyone to just come and talk to you."

He went on to address the very practical ramifications of needing to interact with so much information. This is hard and can be intimidating, and only going to get worse. He explained that this creates a need to better monitor and filter information, and then gave an example of a tool that does this. I was pretty blown away to see that his example was BuzzMonitor, the news monitoring system we built for the World Bank. How awesome is that. And best of all, he repeatedly said "it is not the tool, it is the people." I couldn't agree more.

After his talk, I had the chance to catch up with him and chat about some interesting topics. More on that later.