Blog: Tracking News

Talking with Bloggers, Campaigners, and Progressives about Tracking New and Traditional Media

A lot of campaigners in Washington, DC for Rootscamp just got a peak at Managing News - our news tracker and analyzer tool. If you missed the session, you can check out some videos of the tool here and contact us for a seven day free trial.

The session led into a great discussion on what people in the political realm need with a tool like this - particularly extreme media analyzers and bloggers. That there's a need to track online chatter on both a macro and a micro level wasn't in question - the people in the room knew that was necessary and it's been a recurring theme in all the sessions I've been to so far today. This in itself is really great to hear because we built Managing News to do just that, and to give a snapshot view of what’s happening online around a topic and make it easy for people to take action on it.

There was some good excitement about Managing News' ability to roll a lot of what people are already doing with Bloglines, Google alerts, and manual news reading into one shared platform, and that one that automatically adds information like keywords and locations to the news it sucks in. We also heard some great feature requests - like source exclusion, clipping reports printed in various formats, and close captioning tracking - that will be keeping us busy for awhile : ) Let us know if you have a specific news tracking or analyzing need. We're happy to talk about what Managing News and other tools can do to help.

We just finished our beta work on "Managing News," our name for a team aggregator that allows entire organizations to track, manage, analyze, and act on news. It's like a corporate version of Digg meets Bloglines that allows an entire team to monitor news together.

We'll demonstrate the system and the suite of tools we built for Drupal-powered intranets tonight at the Drupal meetup here in Washington, DC. Stop by the Science Club at 7:00 pm to see the system in action. We'll also make a dataset available of news coverage of eight key congressional and senate races leading up to last month's election. We thought the political folks in DC would find this interesting.

Lately we’ve been working on some aggregation tools that plug into Drupal websites. Eventually these tools will let you enter RSS feeds from any website that has one into your own website and have your website collect, store, and display the content. Once on your site, every piece of content will be able to be searched by keyword. So for example with these tools you could create an up to the minute guide on the latest happenings on, well, anything – water pollution in rivers, Brazilian rubber plantations, or HIV prevention programs in Africa. Pretty cool, huh? Let me back up and explain how it all works.

If you’ve ever read an article on Yahoo! News, you’ve probably noticed that some words are also links and look like . If you click on one of these links, a window pops up with search terms related to that word. If the word was "Apple" and it’s an article about computers, you’ll get search results about Apple computers. But if the article is about pies, you’ll get search terms about apples and other fruit.

The Financial Times has a fascinating article on its front page today about a new system in development that will track “market gossip” on the internet – from blogs to regulatory filings and everything in between.

Its initial purpose will be as a filter for hedge funds to analyze online chatter, and ten different hedge funds have already signed up to try out the system. I can see how this could be extremely beneficial to hedge funds, and I bet this would be useful for a myriad of other purposes too. But I’ll get to that in a minute. Here’s one reason from the article of why this system is valuable.

"It's important to know that the smoke is out there and that others see it," he [Scott Lessing, from Citigroup] said. "There may be more information value in online trends in the aggregate: 5,000 more web mentions of a product than the week before could be an important signal for an analyst covering the product's manufacturer."