MediaCloud

In essence, Media Cloud monitors a set of sources, and then semantically processes the news items from those stories, creating a rich structured dataset which enables various queries and visualizations.

Media Cloud Summary (Image from MediaCloud.org)

The project also relies on a partnership with Calais to provide the term extraction and entity identification capability.

Currently, the visualizations are rather limited. You can create a comparative graphic across any three media sources in the system, of one the following types:

• Top 10 most mentioned terms
• Top 10 Term Pivot
• World Map

Unfortunately there’s no easy way to identify what sources are in the database, other than starting to type and seeing if the autocomplete finds what you’re hoping to use. There’s also no way to tell what “terms” are considered significant, though the error message notes:

The available terms that you can currently serach for are focused on prominent people, places, and events. This will broaden considerably in the future.

It’s the long term plans, not the current visualizations, that make Media Cloud worth watching. Ultimately the Media Cloud project describes itself becoming:

A platform for open, collaborative research by scholars around the world . . . [which] does the heavy lifting in the “cloud” and provides the results as a web service

It isn’t clear at this point what specifically is meant by “in the ‘cloud’” – except in the limited sense that all remote web services could be said to be in the cloud. (See my colleague Andrew Webb’s The Open Cloud for a good overview of the various things “cloud” might mean in today’s environment). Similarly, I believe the only current access to the “web service” is via the front end site at mediacloud.org – no programmatic APIs are exposed yet.

Assuming, however, that the project can reach its goal of an infinitely scalable, cloud-hosted web service which would semantically index a great portion of the relevant media stream, and could be accessed by researchers at low or no cost – that would be a very powerful tool for understanding how media operates online.

Media Cloud is also a free and open source software project, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License and built in Perl using the Catalyst web framework and a PostgreSQL database. (Get code here).

Related:
Calais for Drupal

[Update 3/4/08: Audio from the State of Drupal as well as Jay Batson and Dries' "Presenting Acquia" talk are available on Shai's podcast]

[Updated again 3/6/08: Video from the State of Drupal at Internet Archive]

Not surprisingly, Dries’ state of Drupal presentation was well received by the crowd of assembled Drupalers.

The state of our union is strong, Dries began, citing the success of Drupal 6 in attracting even broader communities of interest. But as we prepare for the broader audiences that success brings, there are things we need to pay more attention to.

The focus of Drupal 7, as Dries recommended to the community, should be on interoperability and usability. This means improving internal and external APIs, enhancing data portability, and redesigning the home of Drupal, drupal.org, to better accomodate the next wave of users joining the community.

(Great to see a project lead of a major open source community paying so much attention to usability!)

The full presentation listed 11 key needs for Drupal 7, highlighting usability and APIs, as well as the more predictable “CCK Fields into core and “Views lite in Core” approach.

Dries also set expectations for the code freeze for Drupal 7 – May 15, 2008- but suggested that code freeze could be delayed as far as October 2008 if 100% test coverage existed for core.

The last section was all about the semantic web and RDF triples, arguing that better usage of structured data in RDF formats could enable Drupal powered sites to become part of the broader emerging data web.

“Google and others want to build a social graph which connects everyone – we have an opportunity to build a larger graph which connects everything.”

I will link to the presentaiton itself when posted – for now also check out http://twitter.com/benfinklea who was live tweeting it and keeping up far better than I could.