Code
The Media Cloud is available as free software under the Affero General Public License. The latest stable release is Media Cloud 0.3.
The Media Cloud 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.
Although the last stable release was in March of 2009, the Media Cloud code base has been under heavy development. Our development is currently hosted on source forge. We recommend that those who are interested in enhancing the code base check out the source forge project page. You may also browse the subversion repository. Those who want additional features and are will to deal with less stability may also want to consider obtaining the code directly from subversion.
I have been working with a friend to run similar analyses at the University of Washington. I am curious to see your code. Thanks.
Tim
good project
Were there are specific development preferences? I was wondering if the web service of the application has been coded as yet? That will surely give a boost to those who want to interface it with other platforms and enrich the underlying code base.
I was wondering if this program could be applied to archived media articles. For example, I would like to see all the articles published by a certain newspaper, written by a specific reporter, within a specific month. Is that possible? If not, is there another program that might help that you know of?