Media Cloud

Media Cloud received a nice write-up in the Times today, featuring Media Clouders Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler.

Like a lot of new ideas, Media Cloud started with a long-running argument among friends. Ethan Zuckerman and a handful of his colleagues at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School found themselves in endless disputes about the mainstream media and newer digital variations. Who sets the agenda? How is public debate shaped? What topics are covered or ignored?

…read more

We’re happy to announce that we’re releasing the first version of the Media Cloud code.

This code does three things:

• Runs a web app that allows you to manage a set of media sources and their feeds.
• Periodically crawls the feeds setup within the web app and downloads any new stories found within the downloaded feeds.
• Extracts the substantive text from the downloaded story content (minus the ads, navigation, comments, etc) and associates a set of tags with each story based on that extracted text.

The system is written perl on top of postgres and uses the catalyst web application framework for the web application.

We’ve been running the code for almost a year now in production, but we’re publishing this as an alpha release because we have not extensively documented the installation or use of the system.

Yesterday, Ethan talked about Media cloud with Joshua Benton of the The Nieman Journalism Lab. Watch it from Josh’s full post (with transcript).

Media Cloud is only in early stages, and under active development.  If you’d like to keep up with what we’re doing, you can subscribe to our blog RSS feed or sign up for our low-traffic announcement mailing list.  On the blog, we’ll discuss what we’re working on and solicit your help.  The mailing list will be only for occasional updates when there are big announcements.

• RSS Feed
• Mailing List

The idea for Media Cloud emerged after a series discussions between faculty and friends of the Berkman Center.  The conversations would follow a predictable pattern: one person would ask a provocative question about what was happening in the media landscape, someone else would suggest interesting follow-on inquiries, and everyone would realize that a good answer would require some real number crunching.  Nobody had the time to develop a huge infrastructure and download all the news just to answer their one question.  However, eventually there were enough of these questions that we decided to build a tool for everyone to use.

So what are your ideas?  What questions could Media Cloud help you answer?  Leave them in the comments below, and we’ll talk about them together.  It will also help us to build the system to support your ideas.