Vertical Views of the Web with BuzzMonitor

You might have noticed that I have not been blogging quite so frequently, lately. Part of the reason has been that we were breaking nights launching BuzzMonitor. I am happy to report that it is live now at [buzzm.worldbank.org].

BuzzMonitor is a nifty Web 2.0 tool conceived by Pierre-Guillaume Wielezynski that allows you to create dynamic, vertical views of the web.

Let's say, you need to stay on top of what's the current buzz about certain subject(s) on the web. One, simple way to do so is to subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds filtered by the subject-specific keyword(s) in your RSS Reader. The problem with such approach is not only how to filter duplicate items brought by different feeds, but more importantly - inability to effectively share the aggregated information with other people, collaborate with them in making sense of it and building a community around the vertical views. BuzzMonitor was built to overcome a challenge like this. In time it acquired additional features supporting better aggregation and collaboration.

We and some people we showed BuzzMonitor to found it so effective that we thought it was worth publishing under an open-source license. That is what we did. You can freely download and even tweak or redistribute it for non-commercial use.

Your feedback is most welcome.