BUZZTRACKING

Buzztracker is software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations appearing in global news coverage.

Buzztracker tries to show you how interconnected the world is: big events in one area ripple to other areas across the globe. Connections between cities thousands of miles apart become apparent at a glance.

Buzztracker currently only tracks English-language news sources.

PRESS

Buzztracker has received press from newspapers and online communities around the world.

DAILYBUZZ

Find out how to add buzztracker to your site.

USING BUZZTRACKER

Buzztracker consists of two types of pages. Daily Indexes and Individual Location Indexes. Buzztracker is meant to be incredibly easy to use, but just to make sure there's no funny stuff going on, here is an explanation:

Daily Index
(buzztracker.org/year/month/day/index.html)

On the daily index page, you should see a list of cities with percentages next to them. The number represents the percentage of news stories that city is associated with for that day.

Locations that appear more often are represented by red circles on the map. The more frequently the cities appear, the larger the circle. Connections between locations are determined by intercontextual referencing in news articles. These connections are represented by lines between locations. The stronger the connection, the darker the line.

Move the mouse over the map to read the location names. Click on a city and relevant news stories will appear. Click "+ Enlarge" to get a larger version of the world map.

Individual Location Indexes
(buzztracker.org/year/month/day/Location.html)

The top 20 locations for the day are listed on the far left. The currently selected location is highlighted.

The middle column -- "Associated Locations" -- lists locations appearing in the same articles as the selected location. The percentages represent the strength of association with the selected location in the left-hand column.

The right column -- "Associated Articles" -- lists all articles associated with the selected location in the left-hand column. The number to the left in parentheses is the number of times the location appears in the article. The articles are sorted by frequency.

HISTORY

Often we are asked, "I am curious about the history of this project of news tracking."

Ask no more, for here is the official buzztracker history:

Buzztracker has been a work in progress since winter 2002-03. Some periods have seen more vigorous activity than others. Moments of particularly high vigor include winter/spring 2002-03, winter 2003-04, and December 2004 to May 2005. Moments of absolutely no vigor include fall 2003, spring, summer and fall 2004.

Winter 2002/2003 (Philadelphia)
• - brainstorming
• - Director prototype

Spring 2003 (Philadelphia)
• - Craig completes fully functional version in Director (see screenshots to right).

Summer 2003 (Seattle/Japan)
• - Bruce is shown the first version of the "news thing" and expresses interest in getting Chin Music Press involved.
• - Craig moves back to Japan.

Fall 2003 (Japan)
• - Some beers in Shibuya with Bjoern Hartmann restart the vigor machine.

Winter 2003 (Japan/Germany)
• - Servers purchased and data collection begins.

Winter/Spring/Summer/Fall 2004 (Japan/U.S.)
• - Engrossed in the design and production of Kuhaku.

Winter 2004/2005 (Japan)
• - Bruce begins to wonder if that "news thing" will ever be done.
• - Work begins on PHP/Mysql version of Buzztracker visualization routines.

Spring 2005 (Japan)
• - Buzztracker goes live.

VELLUM & DRILL BITS

Much of the original output from spring 2003 was printed on semi-transparent vellum at 11"x14". The vellum was mounted between two pieces of 1/8" thick plexiglass. The glass was drilled, 1/2" from the edges on all four corners and four bolts were inserted. When lit from behind by a soft bulb, the image appeared to glow.

The output on the vellum was simply the frequency and inter-contextual relationship data as represented by dots and lines of varying size and opacity. There was no background image of a map.

TECHNICAL DETAILS

The project was originally programmed in winter 2002-03 using Macromedia Director. Director allows rapid prototyping without much fuss. Director, despite being nice to prototype with, is a very slow language (not to mention, slowly dying). Especially for high-traffic web use. We had to fire Director; this was an easy decision. The hard decision was in finding a replacement. Actually, no, that also was easy. HTML and CSS provide enough functionality for a lean, mean buzztracker. The current incarnation is meant to be as light and simple to navigate as possible. It is written in PHP and MySQL. New news data is dynamically added daily.

CARDIAC ARREST

We experienced a brief heart attack when the talented Marcos Wescamp released his Newsmap program, spring 2004. Quickly realizing we weren't doing the same thing, palpitations ceased, regular breathing resumed. We highly recommend checking out his work if you have any interest in interactive design.

Other people and places involved with engaging interactive design:

Jason Salavon: "The Late Night Triad" is a wonderful example of a beautiful manifestation of data mining in video.
Bitforms: A NYC gallery worth checking out if you want to see some physical new media up close.
Yugo Nakamura: Interactive work often interfacing with large pools of data.

MAPS/DATA

The location database I compiled for this project is a stew of various sources. It was cleaned using population statistics and hand checked to get rid of dupes. Here are some of the resources I used when searching for location lists, population statistics, map information:

Maps:
CSU Mapmaker: A deceptively useful tool for generating simple, clean maps.
NASA: The spectacular blue marble image. (including that amazing city lights image)
Asia Historical Maps: Nice old map resource from the University of Texas.

Populations:
World Gazetter
Major Cities and Agglomerations of the World
Popin, global pop. statistics
Geohive, Global Pop. Statistics
Latitude-longitude search engine

CHIN MUSIC PRESS

"What is up with that ink blob at the bottom of every page? Is this some secret corporate project? Are you guys employing evil "zurui" advertising in -9000px divs?"

Chin Music Press is a small independent publishing company (Bruce Rutledge, Yuko Enomoto, Craig Mod) founded in fall 2002 and commited to producing "literary objects." We're book lovers and are trying our hardest to make beautiful little tomes. Our first book, Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan, came out in September 2004. It's a collection of short stories on life in Japan. If this tickles your interest, there is much more information on our homepage.

There is no secret advertising.

"Why did you use a Japanese word in that last answer?"

Actually, you used it in the question. We don't know what it means.

"But buzztracker isn't a book. What's the deal?"

Buzztracker is Chin Music Press' second big project. Chin Music Press feels that while books will never completely disappear, publishers are going to have to start embracing other forms of literary dialogues -- namely creating beautiful, simple and informative online literary dialogues.

Kuhaku is our attempt at making a beautiful and highly entertaining book experience. Buzztracker is our attempt at adding some depth and beauty to the experience of engaging the news.

"This thing is free? Are you guys insane? How the hell are you going to make money?"

Yes. Seems that way. Good question.

Think of buzztracker as a unique public service art project. That's what we do. We have no plans to ever charge for access to this site.

This does cost us quite a bit of money (in the spirit of full disclosure: about US$250/mo for server + bandwidth costs -- in fact, if any kind hosting company would like to sponsor this project please contact us in the form below, and we'd more than welcome any donations. Even better, check out our homepage and if anything strikes your fancy, buy it. Otherwise, help fuel our vigor by sending short (< 100 words) stories about how buzztracker has changed your life in the comment box below.

THANKS

Thanks to the following people for their help through this project:

Bruce Rutledge
Dana Tomlin
Joshua Mosley
Bjoern Hartmann (PHP news collection routines)
Matt Roberts
Amy Calhoun
Norm Badler
k10k

- Craig Mod

LICENSE

The images on this site (buzztracker.org) are licensed under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike).

RSS

Buzztracker offers a daily RSS feed of the latest image and top 10 locations. You can subscribe via this link.

CONTACT

Please send feedback to trackme [_@_] buzztracker.org.

MAILING-LIST

Signup for notices on updates to buzztracker & other Chin Music Press projects. Addresses will never be sold or distributed in any way. In fact, we know how annoying pointless emails can be so our mailings are usually few and far between.

(Screenshot from the original Director version, June 2003)

(June 5th, 2003. Image showing the "SARS triangle" in Asia, and the connections with Canada)

(Output from April 20th to May 13th, 2003)