Things are starting to happen behind the scenes of Buzztracker — a project which has laid largely untouched for the last eight months. There was coffee to be made, cities to be represented, traveling and moving and other miscellaneous activities to be a participant in. But recently it's felt like a good time to turn back to Buzztracker — to add to it in ways I've been itching to for a while now.

A lot has changed. Although almost none of it is visible (I hope). A large chunk of the backend of the site has shifted. When data collection first began (January 2004), "RSS feeds!" was a virtually nonexistent link on newspaper indexes. Google News had taken most of the pain out of finding articles from a wide range of sources and presented the data in a standard format (sidenote:: Google News' homepage format has hardly changed a beat in the last two-and-a-half years). And so, naturally, Google News was a great source to get the project moving.

Times have, thankfully, changed. And now one can grab all the news one could possibly want through neat and easily parsable RSS packets. So I did something I had wanted to do for a while: I disconnected from Google News. Talk about a good feeling. No more dependence on a single big player. Before, if Google News died, Buzztracker died. Now, any number of newspapers around the world could crash and Buzztracker would still be fine.

Thankfully, BT was designed modularly, and shifting the collection routines to pure RSS was a lot less work than it could have been. Right now we have about 80 global news sources being tracked, and as soon as I weed out the bugs and update processing algorithms, I'd like to increase that number.

However, more exciting than anything else is the potential for features and expansion that feeding from RSS brings with it. There's the obvious ability to categorize feeds by a number of different variables. Language, of course, being one of the more intriguing ones. There is also the ability for news sources to send us links and ask for inclusion in the tracking process; something previously impossible under the Google News configuration.

I'm spending my days now taking notes on a number of other news-related sites such as Newsvine and, more generally, newspapers like The New York Times (what a beautiful home page!). Trying to figure out what is and isn't working. Comparing this list to my list of Buzztracker features I'd like to add, and deciding how to proceed. The last thing I want is for Buzztracker to become bloated or top-heavy with unnecessary features. I'm trying to maintain the simplicity of the project, but increase the productivity of the user in subtle but important ways. Sort of like how after living with a trackpad that supports two-finger scrolling, you can never use a normal trackpad again.

For now, the most recent visible update to Buzztracker functionality is on the location pages:

Mouse over the source name and you get a summary for the article. A simple but, I think, very effective way to get a sense for how something is being reported across sources. And this little feature? Another perk of RSS feeds and their summary components.

More soon ...