Since the Lenin’s Tomb blog linked us, traffic has snowballed. News Sniffer has now appeared on Metafilter.com, Democratic Underground, Digg.com and a whole bunch more.

We even made it onto the BBC Radio 5 Live discussion forums. I imagine they’ll censor that though ;)

UPDATE: Medienbote, Germany’s daily media industry newsletter also featured News Sniffer.

Also, I noticed a link from what looks like an internal BBC development web site (they use MoinMoin as their wiki software ).

I was interviewed by Austria’s public service broadcaster, Österreichischer Rundfunk. The article is here in German. My actual e-mail reply to the journalist follows.

1. When did you start working on News Sniffer?

Back in April 2006. It started with the BBC Have Your Say monitoring
system (Watch Your Mouth) and was very simple, just a little code I
threw together out of interest. By August it had become rather more
advanced, with easier browsing and searching. Last week I incorporated
the Revisionista News article monitoring system.

2. What was the original impulse / idea that led to writing News
Sniffer?

I read the Media Lens book Guardians of Power – The Myth of the Liberal
Media. I’d read of corporate media bias before but always with a US
focus. Media Lens gave solid modern examples of how the so-called
liberal UK media also distort and ignore the truth.

On the Media Lens forum, I came across some people discussing how their
‘Have Your Say’ comments had been censored by the BBC. After poking
around their RSS feeds, I realised I could rig something up to monitor
some of this censorship. I was interested to see if I’d be able to spot
any interesting trends.

3. How many visitors do you have on an average day?

Up until this week I’d not had many visitors as I’d done very little to
promote it, but I’ve had a 60 fold increase in the last 2 days due to a
link from a high profile political blog, Lenin’s Tomb.

4. Did the BBC react to News Sniffer?

I’ve not heard anything from them yet, but I’ve seen visits from their
IP addresses and I noticed a link from an internal BBC website of some
kind so they know of it.

5. Did you write News Sniffer for an organization (e. g. an NGO)
or ist it your private initiative?

It’s an entirely private initiative. Nobody has paid me to do this. For
now, it’s not costing much money to run and I’m happy to make time for
it. I plan to release the source code so anybody can help with
development and even run it for themselves.

6. On the News Sniffer site you already announced that you’d like
to expand the service to other news sites as well. Which ones would
that be? Do you have ideas for new components like “Revisionista”?

The Guardian are probably a good one since they are seen as ‘liberal’
and The Independent too. I’ve had requests for Australian ABC as it’s
another state run news outlet. I might drop in something like FOX news,
just for the hilarity value. Perhaps also Österreichischer
Rundfunk.

I have some ideas for features to allow the community to categorise the
various data. This could allow better analysis but there is always a
danger we’ll introduce our own bias. It’s a difficult problem.

I’m also looking into statistical analysis of the censored comments.
It’d be fun to be able to predict what comments are most likely to get
removed.

Thanks for your time and your help! (I really like Revisionista.)

No problem and thanks, I’m glad you like it.

I hope your editors let you publish the article without pulling all the
interesting bits out :)