Commentariat

This is an experimental site to help you monitor what the various members of the “Commentariat” are saying easily.

The aim of the site is to see how far the highly expensive paid for services for monitoring and analysing “comment” can be put together without charging any significant money.

Background

A few days ago I wrote about a guide to the commentariat published by Editorial Intelligence, I said:

Editorial Intelligence’s service was quoted as an example of a site helping people get to grips with online comment. I disagree - it is expensively paid for and therefore helps maintain an “in-crowd”.

I’m wondering if the Editorial Intelligence Model is now way past it’s sell by date - given that summaries of most of the stuff written by commentators and columnists is now syndicated via RSS. I wonder whether MySociety could build us something better for the whole world - not just those who can afford the subscriptions - to use if someone gave them £5k and a month.

Combine that with the availablility of the domain commentariat.org.uk and I thought I would see what could be done in a few hours. This site is the result.

Current Features

At the moment this site provides these facilities:

• The brief summaries of each article or story made available for syndication on other sites.
• Search across all these summaries.
• Categorisation by author, feed and media organisation.
• Direct links to the original stories.
• A tag cloud.
• Archives navigable by date.
• Regular updates.

This is based on a sample of around 30 RSS feeds, and is therefore a strictly limited trial.

A more comprehensive service would need to monitor perhaps 400-500 feeds and would take some investment (perhaps £100 a year on a better hosting service than I use at present).

The site is not intended to be a discussion site - in accordance with the Code of Practice I published last summer, it is better thought of as a combined “contents list” and “index” which exists to help visitors find out what has been published, and then to drive traffic to the original articles.

Where next?

I’m not sure where this is going (there are dozens of other things that can be done quite easily), but I would welcome any comments you might have.

If you would like to get in touch, I can be contacted on mattwardman AT gmail DOT com.