Dan Gillmor is a BoingBoing guest-blogger.
The Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society‘s new Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas. This is an open-source project, and we will be releasing all of the code soon. You can read more background on the project or just get started below.
(Note: I’m a Berkman Fellow, but I’d highlight this even if I wasn’t. This is an important project for helping us understand what’s going on in media.)