I agree that there are some issues to be worked through, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call them ‘major problems.’

1. The bias of the controlling entity can, and should, be used to the advantage of the process to, for example, correct the tendency for the most vocal –or those with digital access– to dominate the discussion.
2. Similarly, the ultimate definition of the issue will really be a result of the engagement, steered by the agency (your wisdom of the crowds remark is particularly apposite in this case).
3. The lack of visibility is a showstopper (at the moment). Microformats seemed to be a popular topic at BarCamp, perhaps there is some hope there?

On first pass over this posting I skipped over the Buzzmonitor comments. Just now I read it in full and went to the site. It resonated closely with what I ranted about at BarCampWellingtonNZEGov.

I was suggesting a news aggregator (similar to news.google.com) that could bring government/authorative and private space comments together to provide a common view of the various sides to an issue. Ranging up and down the long tail to provide visiblilty to the Transit NZ discussions in Auckland over roads and equally apply to the liver bellied spotted newt’s wildlife sanctuary proposed for just west of the median barrier on highway one north of Foxton.

Buzzmonitor seems to be a very good start to that aggregator. I plan to have a play with it myself.

I have thought harder on the problem and see major problems in my idea, among them:

• The inherent bias of the ‘controlling’ entity
• The difficulty in defining the issue accurately without misrepresentation
• The lack of enough visibility into the authoritative government sites (my assumption).

I suppose they are all solvable, likely by a bit of “Wisdom of the Crowds”, but for someone with more free time than me.

If you need more…the World Bank has released its “buzzmonitor” under the GNU General Public License.

http://buzzm.worldbank.org/

Or, tweak your existing mainstream media monitoring platform to integrate RSS feeds. That’s what we do.

ciao
i.

I believe that web logs are an increasingly significant part of the media mix and many clients have requested this monitoring service over the past few months.

We simply see ourselves as an aggregator and some blogs have influential opinions that communicators cannot afford to ignore.