Development Seed Blog

The World Bank just made its open source aggregator BuzzMonitor available to the public to take for a test drive. This is great news. We worked with the World Bank to build the system, based on Pierre Wielezynski's ideas for source profiling, Yahoo term extraction, Technorati integration, Alexa rankings, tagging, voting and graphing. World Resources Institute also played a hand in the development and is currently using a customized version to track news internally. There is now an online demo up that shows how the World Bank monitors news about AIDS and Africa.

This is a rare glimpse at how an international development agency tracks its online impact and monitors news that affects its mission. It really helps show that other organizations need to take more proactive steps to help their communications departments and program managers cut though information overload.

Folks like Pierre, who is leading this project and who we closely worked with on it, understands this need to empower communications within a large organization like the World Bank. For example, he saw that the communications staff were having a hard time cutting though the online chatter and making sense of where this news was coming from in an efficient way. So Pierre requested that the news tracker profile the news feeds' sources and prominently display this information. This is now one of the most exciting features in the tool, giving teams the ability to suck in a lot of key word feeds and quickly see the root sources. Additionally over time the aggregator displays this information in clusters. You can see that the key word feed "Africa and AIDS" pulled in two stories from Oxfam, UK in just over a week.

Guess what the tool found to be the place where the most chatter is happening regarding AIDS and Africa? MySpace. Details like source profiling will help push other organizations to demand a new level of insight to effectively monitor their message. More detailed profiling is needed to make the tool more valuable, but it currently shows very well where the noise is coming from.

Could something like this help during disasters to show localized content bubbling up and reveal stories that the main stream media misses? Or could it be used by election monitoring organizations to get a glimpse of the vibe on the ground in a hostile environment where the government controls the media and the people's only channel is though community spaces like MySpace? For now a lot more work is needed on this tool (our developer wish-list is constantly growing), but thanks to the World Bank for publicly releasing a version of the tool. I'm sure this will prove to be a great case study that shows that a proactive communications plan needs the right tools.