Blog: News Tracking

From a Blog to Traditional Media, Then Back to Blogs

Who would have thunk that Fidel Castro could be a buzz leader in the U.S. blogosphere? Well, not me at least. But he sure was when he published his thoughts on the invincibility of a Clinton Obama ticket in 2008 - it positively rocketed around the blogosphere.

I took a quick look at a Blogpulse trend report on the phrase "Clinton Obama ticket" and got the graph below. Check out the large spike in the term's use right around today. Wow, right?

You can’t really tell on this image, but the traffic on that term was almost nil on August 27th and then spiked on the 28th. The spike is even larger if you look at the posting traffic for the last 6 months.

Obviously, Castro was hardly the first person to think, postulate, or write about the possibility of the two nominees joining forces, but why would his article in a Spanish-language paper lead to such a burst of discussion?

Tools That Show What's Happening in a Glance

One of the features that sets the Managing News system apart from other aggregators is that it makes it easy to act on information. It does this by showing you the big picture of what’s going on within the system over different timeframes.

The latest graph we plan to integrate into Managing News is a line graph that will show the terms (with the highest and lowest rate of change) that have risen or fallen fastest over a period of time. This will quickly show you the newest hot topics and what is already old news. A big benefit of this graph is that it will cut out issues that are always talked about in your field.

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.