Sunlight Foundation

Berkman's New Media Cloud

Earlier today, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, teamed with Thomson Reuters, launched Media Cloud, a new project that tracks news content comprehensively with free, open and flexible research tools.

It’s the brainchild of Berkman fellow Ethan Zuckerman and Berkman Faculty Co-Director (and Sunlight advisory board member) Yochai Benkler. The goal is for the site to be an open research platform that allows unprecedented quantitative analysis of media trends by automatically downloading, processing, and querying the full text of stories and blog posts from thousands of media outlets.

Berkman’s announcement quotes Yochai, “While daily newspapers struggle for survival, political, niche and special interest blogs continue to thrive. In the midst of this upheaval, it is difficult to know where stories begin, who sets the agenda, and how these dramatic changes impact news coverage on the whole. We created Media Cloud to help researchers and the public get quantitative answers to these challenging questions.”

The hope is for Media Cloud will help map the interaction between mainstream media, citizen media and blogs to give a more accurate and comprehensive view of how people influence, shape and interact with the news.

The Nieman Journalism Lab put this video of Ethan describing and walking us through Media Cloud on their site:

Ethan Zuckerman on Media Cloud from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

Dave Weinberger calls it of Berkman’s most exciting projects, and Doc Searls notes that the Berkman folks are looking for feedback. So go check it out.

Congrats to Ethan, Yochai and the Berkman community on this great new tool.

Benefits in Admitting Failures

There was a really interesting article in the New York Times yesterday that had a headline attention grabbing headline of Foundations Find Benefits in Facing Up to Failures. I had two reactions: "how refreshing" and "well, sure."

Sunlight deliberately set out to be experimental - to throw ideas and projects on the wall and see if they stuck and if they didn't, to stop and figure out why. This was key to our grant making strategy as well. When you hope to be on the cutting edge you expect some things not to work. So we figured we'd win some, lose some. That seemed right to us. Fascinating how risk averse some of the truly big foundations have been and unwilling to admit, until recently, that some things just don't work.


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The Sunlight-Berkman Conference on Political Information was a success

Yesterday the Sunlight Foundation and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society hosted the Sunlight-Berkman Conference on Political Information. Our new intern Andrew MacRae attended the Conference in Boston and wrote up this review of the day:

On January 15th, 2007, the Sunlight Foundation in cooperation with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society held an all day workgroup entitled “Local Political Information in an Internet Era”. The session brought together bloggers and organizations, in an attempt to share data, goals and thoughts. For addition coverage see what other participants had to say, Ethan Zuckerman, Jake Shapiro, John Palfrey, Dan Gillmor, David Weinberger and more.

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