News Sniffer blipped on the BBC radar this week. Someone mailed their public “backstage” mailing list with a link and it eventually turned up on the backstage.bbc.co.uk blog.

Richard Sambrook, Director of BBC Global News, has commented too.

I’m not sure why he’s so Interested in what my name is, but I’ve added it clearly to the about page now. It’s not like it was a big secret.

An ex-BBC employee, Martin Belam, commented extensively on it too.

I also got invited to discuss News Sniffer on the backstage mailing list by Ian Forrester of the BBC. An archive of the mailing list is available. With a notable threads starting here. I posted some details of the inner workings of News Sniffer too.

The ‘Watch Your Mouth’ system is currently marking some comments as censored when they are not. This seems to be due to the BBC’s servers being out of sync with each other and I get out of date RSS feeds. I have a solution for this and am working on it.

This was brought to my attention (very gracefully) by a BBC employee.

UPDATE:: Problem fixed. No more comments should be mis-classified. I’m working on verifying the backlog, but it should only have been a small number of comments. It was a bit of a corner case causing the problem.

In drumming up some more attention for News Sniffer, I e-mailed the Biased-BBC blog which then linked us in a posting. Some comments on their post brought up the issue of News Sniffer Bias. Here is a quick response I put together:

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I rolled out the new version of News Sniffer last night. It’s mostly changes to Revisionista:

• The Guardian and Independent World and UK feeds added to Revisionista
• Voting system for Revisionista versions. Recommend interesting revisions for others
• Recommended revisions list and RSS feed
• The Revisionista revision list displays the latest title
• Tweaked the Revisionista layout to be a bit cleaner
• Added some more stats to the front page summary
• The Revisionista search now includes titles
• A few performance tweaks

The search system is a little crummy at the moment. I have plans to add a more advanced searching system in future.

Anyway, get recommending revisions!

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.
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I’ve made a few changes to fix the completely screwed layout that Internet Explorer users were seeing. Sorry about that.

The latest News Sniffer project went live on Sunday: Revisionista. It tracks changes in corporate news articles and marks the differences. So you can choose a BBC news article and see how it’s changed since it was first created. Most changes are on breaking new articles which get updated as more information becomes available, but some changes are rather telling of policy.

Currently only the BBC is monitored, but it’s pretty easy for me to add support for any site with an RSS feed (which I’ll be doing soon). Suggestions of what sites to monitor?

Some examples:
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Just a quick post to get this blog started.

Here you’ll be able to find the latest news on News Sniffer.  Exciting stuff huh?