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Open Source Aggregator Launched by the World Bank
The World Bank, Development Seed and World Resources Institute have developed a new open source aggregator, the BuzzMonitor.
BuzzMonitor was originally created for the World Bank to help it watch what was being said about it online:
Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple plaforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it. At the time, no solution (either commercial or open source) met those requirements so we decided to build our own.
I checked out the demo page, which shows you the results for a search of feeds containing the keywords, ""HIV AIDS Africa" and "Malaria Africa" from Blogpulse, Technorati, Flickr, Google Blog Search and Google Videos. It was pretty cool, and has an attractive interface. I just wish the demo let you do your own searches to help you figure out how well it works for the issues important to you.
What do you think?
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Latest Comments
- Sounds like a very good
6 hours 21 min ago - You bet!! Just need to
1 day 47 min ago - Thanks!
2 days 24 min ago
Comments
Oh please ....
Whilst I appreciate that developers have to cut a crust - and DevSeed have been great about using the presumably lucretive WorldBank contact to sponsor The Leech's further development - this whole distro really smacks of an organisation arriving late to the wrong party. It's doesn't cache or permalink the original source, and really adds little to what one can gain for free from a half-decent RSS reader? Once again the World Bank shows it can blow money without concern for value or impact, and that there are plenty of beltway leeches to sieze on the error.
Glad you like Leech!
Hi i.p,
Glad you like Leech! Check out some of the most recent benchmarks comparing Leech to other parsers that Aron Novak pulled together, http://groups.drupal.org/node/4519.
As for the BuzzMonitor, don't think of it as a distro but rather the first go at a tool that has a ton of potential. And to second what Pierre said, it does have some nice collaborative features. We're continually working to improve the system, and this summer Aron is lending a hand as part of his work with Google's Summer of Code will help everyone interested in aggregation that is using Drupal. Our next step is to turn this into an installer profile.
And regardless, this work is really helping the Drupal community!
Eric
Hey there
oops
Many apologies for my outburst earlier in the first comment. The lesson here is that Drupal must build a comment system which:
So ...
@Eric ... where I come from, tech consultancies gut donors like the World Bank by relying on their risk aversion. Nice to see soneone buck the trend.
@Pierre - you are correct: The Leech outperforms most current web-based aggregators by a degree (I know because I use it!), and Buzz's UI enhancements improve it still further.
As a product, Buzz is neat, and I like the way that it's quite easy to get started with. Why not use some of the World Bank's fat-ass comms budget ;) to provide it as a free, turnkey hosted service to small development organisations so they don't even have to think about the technical side? A DGroups for aggregation - could be nice project for someone like Kabissa. I suspect - now the haze has cleared - that this was the point I was trying to make by saying that you were arriving late to the wrong party.
The buzzmonitor
Hi Brit,
Thanks for checking out the buzzmonitor and helping spread the word. Given the fact that it is an aggregator, the buzz aggregates whatever you feed it. For the demo, we have used a couple of feeds arounf HIV aids and africa. The idea is that you can download it, install it on your server, and create your own feeds (i.e. the ones that matter to you). You can put search feeds for whatever keywords you want or simply add a bunch of blogs you subscribe to etc. etc.. You feed it and it aggregates, generates the tag clouds, ranks etc...Makes sense?
Cheers,
PG
More demo searches?
Hi Pierre,
I totally get it. It wouldn't be a demo if you could use it fully (: Maybe you could offer a few more search result samples. I've got so much stuff on my computer, I'm kinda picky about the new things I download so I need a little more info.
Just a suggestion from a potential consumer, it looks like a cool tool!
Britt
Britt Bravo
Community Builder
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