We're not shy at CMP, so when Nik Mercer of Anthem magazine asked if he could interview us for the magazine's website, we said, "Hell yes," then proceeded to talk over each other until Nik had enough to emerge with this nifty little interview.. Anybody else want to chat?

It's the 2 1/2 year old project, geriatric by web standards, long in the tooth and all that, that keeps getting link love from the strangest of places. Yahoo News, France gave BT a nice link on their homepage.

And now back to the book trenches. We have about 24 hours until the final files need to be delivered to the printers here in Tokyo. Yoga and coffee (canned and otherwise) fueled design and editing to ensue.

After eons of neglect and mal-nutrition I've finally gotten around to fixing the RSS feed on Buzztracker. Apologies to everyone subscribed -- it was one of those small details that sunk to the bottom of my to-do list. For 8 months.

I rebuilt it with the feed creator php class which I am assuming will be more reliable than my hobbled together, home-brewed duct-tape solution that died, inexplicably, a long time ago.

A year has passed but the world isn't forgetting New Orleans and Katrina just yet.

For what it's worth, New Orleans has been at the top of Buzztracker for the last four days. Eclipsing the usually unseatable champions Baghdad and Gaza as the focal point of world news.

Buzztracker 8/27
Buzztracker 8/28
Buzztracker 8/29
Buzztracker 8/30

This came to my attention today while doing some maintenance on Buzztracker — we've broken 1,000,000 indexed articles. 1,094,976 as of 12:45 AM JST to be precise.

A big thanks to everyone who has supported this project and continues to use and find value in it.

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 ...

It was just brought to my attention that Buzztracker has been nominated /shortlisted for a Webby. This is nice news to start Golden Week with, and it just happens to coincide with a chunk of really down-and-dirty glamourless backend rewriting I had been doing lately. More on the backend later.

For now, if you dig Buzztracker, go and cast your people's choice vote. Thanks!

Update: Just 5 hours ago we were listed in the NetArt category. Now we're gone. I took a partial screen shot (originally for the blog). Here it is to prove we're not insane:

I've emailed the Webby people about this ... Will see what they have to say!

If you'd like to email them too to voice your support the address seems to be: techsupport_pv@webbyawards.com.

Update 2: From the Executive director of the Webby awards:

Hi, Craig:

Thanks for your note. I'm really sorry for the confusion. We were doing some work on our database in the late hours of the night and early this morning and that led to a glitch that temporarily displayed some incorrect information for the NetArt category. We were immediately alerted to this by our system and took steps to fix it. I believe the information was displaying incorrectly for about 5 hours, and the glitch was resolved and pushed live at 930AM EST.

The correct and audited nominees for NetArt are:

1. Color of Sound
http://concretethestudio.com/colo...

2. justcurio.us
http://www.justcurio.us

3. PostSecret
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

These are the three nominees that were announced on April 11th and those results were audited and tabulated by PricewaterhouseCoopers to ensure fairness and accuracy.

Please accept my apologies for the confusion.

David-Michel

I will now humbly bow back to my corner.

Update 3: Some people have been asking why there are only three entries in the NetArt category. I had the same question last night when I saw Buzztracker was removed. Here is the response I got from David-Michel:

Hi, Craig:

[...]

In certain smaller categories, The Academy will sometimes choose to honor less than 5 sites. Blog - Political also has 3 nominees this year.

Best wishes, David-Michel

Does this still mean I can put a "Nominated for Webby for over *five hours*" sticker on Buzztracker?

What's bizarre/funny/sad/implied about all of this is the fact that clearly Buzztracker was close to being shortlisted (unless there were only five entries in the NetArt category). But for some reason they decided not to include it.

Perhaps most telling about how arbitrary awards can be, Buzztracker wasn't even given "Top 20% Official Honoree" status. I won't make any assertions but it's nice to know Buzztracker wasn't overlooked in favor of clearly much more innovative and culturally important sites.

In the words of Ze Frank: "Kill me."

Love him or hate him, you can't deny his prolific presence in information design. Anyone who's a fan of thoughtful, insightful graphics knows of Edward Tufte. His first three books — books I'm sure I've mentioned here countless times — have become so standard that saying one should own them has become cliche. Everybody from the 16-year-old web designer down the road to the 60-year-old book designer in the woods has them.

Nine years in the making, his highly anticipated Beautiful Evidence is just about done.

While not popping out until April, us poor folk can start pinching pennies to save up for it. It must be nice to know you can probably push out a 10,000-copy print run and sell out almost immediately!

Buzztracker gets a lot of traffic. It also costs a lot to run. The maintenance cost is mainly in servers — it takes a lot of horsepower to handle 450,000 to 500,000 unique visitors a month. But on top of servers is, of course, my salary (when I'm working on it full-time). We're wary of slapping ads on it for the sake of revenue because it was never initially intended as a direct money-making mechanism. So instead of bombarding people with Google ads, we added a simple link for donations. We figure, if you use buzztracker (and obviously, a lot of people do — regularly), then you could probably afford to give up five bucks.

The thought process was like this: if just 1% of 1% of the people who visit buzztracker.org donated $5 a month, we'd cover server costs and be perfectly happy. 1% of 1% is not a lot. At least, I don't think so. And we have enough traffic where that small percentage is, while not huge, enough to help us along and continue offering the project to the public.

So in the two months we've had the donations link up, how much money has come in? Five bucks.

Which equals 0.0001%. (Our goal was 0.01%)

*sigh*

We didn't expect an outpouring of support but we did expect a bit more than that. Call it what you like — faith in humanity, the impossible optimism you need to run a small publishing company. If anything, this feels like it's been more of a curious experiment than a futile plea for cash. What we've learned is that people don't give money when they absolutely don't have to.

So what are we to do? Making books is expensive. We'd like to make a lot more. In fact, it's rather stupid that we don't make more than we do — and we would, had we an infusion of cash. We have a national distribution network and a small but acutely dedicated team. We also like to think we have a finger on the online and digital publishing pulse. There are lots of interesting things to be put out there in beautiful little packages but not a whole lot of money floating around to do it with. Last year we stumbled through our birthing process; this year has been the year in which we defined ourselves in broader strokes, and 2006 is going to have to be the year we pull all of these bits and pieces — our books, our online work — together and find the cash to take this operation to the next level.

But for now, I'm off to donate a few bucks to all the small sites I frequent regularly.

For the first time to my knowledge, Buzztracker was podcasted. A calm and collected David Warlick shares his kind thoughts on Buzztracker and the implications for teaching using these sorts of tools. Thanks David!

(The Buzztracker bit is towards the end of the Podcast).

Excellent visualization of Tour de France data representing cumulative time for each leg. Armstrong and Ullrich are highlighted. Via Stat. Graphics Blog.

For all of us map obsessives out there: Google Maps now maps Tokyo.

Some of my favs:
West Shinjuku
The Budokan
Imperial Palace
Train repair yard in Bunkyou-ku
The crazy pyramid at Gakusyuuin University
Tokyo Station and the edge of Ootemachi

Tipped off by js.

We're today's feature widget. Nice work, Craig!

The buzztracker widget is done! I finished it up earlier this week. It lets you add buzztracker to your dashboard layer on Apple's OS X 10.4 Tiger.

The widget is available for download from apple.com's widget section. I added some development notes /tips on making widgets to the widget homepage over at buzztracker.org.

Making this was surprisingly easy considering I am not a software developer. Starting from absolutely no knowledge of widget production to the final product took about a week of on and off work. Most of the time was spent refining the interface — learning some photoshop tricks to achieve that Apple Look. I also learned that Javascript is fairly robust and simple to implement although the debugging process is awkward and hacky.

While it's entirely possible I'll never make another widget for the rest of my life, it was a fun project. And if the buzztracker.org log files are anything to go by, the twofold increase in traffic to the site means the exposure gains for the project were well worth the small time investment.

Just want to bring everyone's attention to a friend of mine doing some really amazing research over at Stanford. Bjoern was instrumental in helping get the latest incarnation of buzztracker off the ground. During Christmas 2003, after climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with his dad, he pumped out the PHP routines to grab the news off of the Google pages in about two days. He also helped make sure the servers didn't die during the first couple of months of collection, that data backups ran smoothly and that MySQL played happily with the scripts.

He has some insane projects in the pipeline that, if I mention here, he may have to kill me. Or maybe some small, pasty white bald man smelling of a computer lab will show up late at night, standing at the foot of my bed, glaring down at me through coke-bottle glasses, teeth rank with rotten fillings like the employees of Yodobashi Camera, blood and Cheetos staining his lab coat, breathing deeply, erratically from walking up my steep stairs to the second floor — glaring long and hard at my sleek, tanned, 6'3" physique, my diamond naval piercing, a nude model next to me in bed, another nude model on the futon on the floor next tot he bed, a tattoo of Kuhaku on her left buttocks — he'll open his mouth and say, "This is for Bjoern. This is for revealing his insane projects," as crusty, dark spittle soars in all directions and he plunges into my thick, chiseled chest a PPro 200 processor, screaming, "THERE IS NO FLOATING POINT ERROR!!!"

I do not want to be assassinated by the Stanford undercover comp-sci version of Leon. So I will say, just keep an eye on Bjoern's blog.

I was interviewed via instant messenger by Jeremy Wagstaff last Thursday. We spent a good hour talking about Buzztracker, information visualization and the changing face of news. Today, his column came out with a very positive writeup on buzztracker. Says Jeremy:

Launched last month, Buzztracker appears as a map of the world, dotted with red circles of varying size. ...

It's an elegant, simple view of what's going on in the world. But it's more than that: The links underline the way that events in one place are connected to those in other places — one great example is the recent spat between China and Japan about how each country was represented in respective textbooks, superficially resolved by a summit in Indonesia. On Buzztracker you see a triangle of thick red dots linked by thick gray lines. Such webs, Mr. Mod says, are "supposed to get people thinking about why these connections exist."

Jeremy then goes on to talk about Newsmap, the extremely talented Marcos Weskamp's news visualization tool.

The article isn't online (and even if it is, the WSJ charges for its online news), but if possible I highly recommend getting your hands on it (Asian Wall Street Journal, May 13th, 2005, Personal Journal section P5) — it poses a lot of good questions regarding news online.

You can read a partial transcript of both our interviews with Jeremy on Jeremy's blog, Loosewire.

A few years ago, there was the SARS "epidemic." After breaking out in some Canadian provinces, strong connections between Asia and Canada began to appear. These sorts of relationships are meant to spark inquisitive dialogues: "How did SARS get to Canada? What sort of screening do we have to do on planes to keep it from spreading?" and so on.

Recently, with all the hub-bub between Japan and China over wartime atrocities, a small but interesting connection in Asia was formed: Tokyo -> Beijing -> Jakarta. Jakarta? That's where Koizumi submitted an apology at an international conference just a few days ago. Now he and the President of China are meeting there on Saturday to discuss, one would imagine, what steps are going to be necessary to quell the protests and riots in China and bring relations back to more stable ground.

Buzztracker had just gone live 12 hours earlier when, suddenly, there were literally dozens of people a second visiting the site. Last week, thanks to a nod from Slashdot, which is akin to getting a New York Times front-page article in terms of readership, I woke up on Tuesday morning to a torrent of traffic. Looking at the logs, I immediately noticed one striking discrepancy — despite having a contact form available on the about page, nobody was sending feedback; the hordes had locked lips. Well, that's not entirely true. Three people out of about 40,000 had sent feedback. I sat there in my underwear thinking it seemed odd that no one had anything to say.

After many many many long months of sitting locked in my room (or in a cafe down the road), programming and tweaking, buzztracker is finally up! Buzztracker tracks news events by collecting references to locations across thousands of news articles. It also collects contextual connections between those locations. The result is buzztracker.org. A site that allows you to interact with these patterns and explore the news in (hopefully) new and interesting ways. (warning: using buzztracker may be addictive)

Buzztracker is a project I've been working on for ages (about 2 1/2 years now) that I was never able to see through to the end. I introduced Bruce to it about 20 months ago, and he seemed willing to financially support its production. Finally, after many many near-death experiences, buzztracker is alive and kicking, more virile than ever. It sports a not-too-shabby index of some 500,000 news articles from which it makes its images.

Since it's not a bound and printed volume, we're going to be constantly tweaking it (whether this is a gift or curse remains to be seen!). We have a lot of great ideas for new features and are planning on releasing some buzz related items which we'll reveal a bit further down the road.

For now, go, enjoy buzztracker!

(Note to self: when writing a blog entry exhausted after almost 2 days of wakefulness, stay away from dreams! (click below the fold to read the original dream post.))

She whispers something to me but I can't quite make it out. What? Tissues? Yes, I have some tissues. No, she mouths, earthquake. Tissue. Jishin. Tissue. Jishin. I juggle the Japanese back and forth. Then, despite being far above the neon the air begins to tremble and my eyes bolt open.

"Jishin. Jishinn," she says, her eyes too are wide open, but not yet awake. They're somewhere else, desperately trying to get here. I brace myself in my bed. The shaking lasts only a few seconds. Maybe longer but still, it feels like only a moment. Disappointed, as I always feel after such a small tremor, I drift back asleep.

---

A few hours later I wake up and roll over to my computer. A page only a handful of people know about comes up with a big red dot over Tokyo. An earthquake hit at 7:22 AM. For a moment I'm filled with the feeling you get when things mesh together perfectly. And as soon as that moment fades I realize it's time to finally publicly release this thing (although, something tells me the tens of thousands of people viewing it over the last couple of days already makes it public).

So here, allow me to expel these old paranoia demons of creativity breathing down my neck. Something which would have been impossible without the help of Chin Music Press' (Brucer!) unwavering support. Chin Music Press' second project:

http://www.buzztracker.org