Disclosure: Reuters Calais is an RWW sponsor. And they are awesome.

Top 10 Chart

This tool lets you compare up to three media sources, generating a list of the top ten most mentioned terms for that source and relative frequency of use for each term. This chart can be useful in a number of ways, indicating not only what terms are considered most important by each news source at the moment you generate the chart, but also showing if there is a clear standout term that may indicate a very hot topic. Also, when comparing two similar media sources, say for example the New York Times and the Washington Post, the resulting chart can give you an idea of what each paper considers more important leading topics.

Top 10 Term Pivot Chart

You can put in your own search term and up to three media sources in this tool to see what terms are most frequently mentioned alongside the search term in those sources' stories. This allows you to gain insight on how frequently related terms cluster together. So, for example if you search for Obama, you might find that, while United States is the most common related term, CNN's focus is more on Congress while FOX News writes more about the White House.

World Map Chart

This tool shows global coverage of all terms in the Media Cloud database for the selected media sources. Naturally, a newspaper that is focused on national US news will not have the depth of coverage of a source that has an international perspective. But even when comparing similar international sources, the weight each source gives to news from different regions can differ greatly. Take the New York Times versus BBC news coverage, you will see that darker colors mean that BBC has heavier coverage of European affairs, while NYT has stronger coverage of Canada and Mexico news topics.

Discussion

Media Cloud is a project that developed from discussions around where story trends came from. This tool attempts to serve as a foundation to help move these conversations forward, and the Berkman Center is keeping the door open for new ideas and ways of using this data. To that end, they also have a discussion forum where people can contribute suggestions, thoughts and ideas to the project. Media Cloud also provides an RSS feed and an email list you can subscribe to if you want to stay in the loop for any new developments.

Like our coverage of the New York Times R&D Labs, we see this as an example of how the Internet is driving traditional media to change and respond in new ways. We are excited by the scope and potential that Media Cloud brings to anyone interested in following news and media trends.

Last night I wrote about the Universal Canvas. Today in my RSS newsreader, what should appear but a great post from Steve Gillmor on the same topic. Of course being a pro, Steve made his point way better than me. Microsoft has all the pieces, says Steve, to "create a browser-hosted read-write tool for sharing and routing information."

But the pieces are being fitted together to reveal a jigsaw puzzle that looks suspiciously like the Windows Operating System. As Steve puts it: "We'll get the long-promised Universal Canvas, but sorry folks it will have to be Windows end to end."

Steve also wrote in an earlier post that "Office is now a System, BizTalk is now a System (Jupiter) and IE is part of the Operating System."

All this talk (including from me) about the universal canvas moving away from the browser and into the Office/Operating system, is a little scary. The World Wide Web was originally meant to be a decentralized network of information where people could read and write freely, as in both free beer and free speech.

Sure the browser market has been largely controlled by Microsoft these last few years, but at least browsers run on the World Wide Web - and the Web is as universal as it gets in the digital domain. So where does it leave us if the future canvas for our browsing and creating is embedded in a "system", owned by one company, rather than on a universal network owned by no one? Is the Universal Canvas going to bypass the Web?

I've been Scobleized. Now I really am part of the blogosphere...yay :-)

I've installed the W3C web browser/editor, Amaya, onto my PC. I've only just begun to test it. But with all this talk about Microsoft abandoning its IE browser, it may pay to actively look at alternative browsers. This article at freshmeat.net has a good write-up on lightweight browsers, including Amaya.