Based on Slurp140 technology, the new Twitter stream updates automatically to display new tweets, a leaderboard of most frequent tweeters, and stats on your tweets over time.

Best of all, you can instantly reply to or retweet any mention right from your tweet stream!

The new Twitter tool complements ImpactWatch’s existing range of feed sources which includes print, online or broadcast news, and social media sources. Depending on your monitoring and measurement needs we can customize your platform with the sources that are important to you.

Graphs and statistics also update in real-time on the Dashboard page, so you can see the who, when and what of your Twitter coverage.

We have a lot of features on the way in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for more. Sign up for a Demo Account now to check it out!

• Social Media Monitoring: Why You Must & Its Value – Techrigy

• Make Sure Social Media Metrics Are Meaningful – IT Business Edge

• The Truth About Measuring Social Media – Nation Ranch

• Scaling Social Media – Web Trends

• Can computers take the place of the personal touch in media evaluation - Corp Comms Magazine

• Social-Media ROI Elusive: MarketingProfs Poll – Marketing Profs

• Meeting the New Media Challenge with ROI – TalentZoo

• Why Your Small Business Needs to Measure Its Return on Social Media Investments – Content Marketing Today

Cross posted from The Bivings Report

Anyone that has been to a tech conference the last few years knows that there is a huge amount of back channel communication that occurs on Twitter.   People provide live coverage of the talks they go to.  People organize dinner plans.  People stage revolts against panelists.  The conversation is constant, unfiltered and takes place in real time.

The preeminent poli-tech conference, Personal Democracy Forum, takes place next Monday and Tuesday in New York City.  Since we are a sponsor and partner of the Personal Democracy Forum, we decided to launch a tool that will aggregate conversation around the conference.  Check out Twitterslurp for #pdf2009.

We are finishing up details, but here is a list of Twitterslurp’s key features:

• The site will ingest any posts tagged as “#pdf09″, “#pdf2009″ or “Personal Democracy Forum” onto our main page in real time.  We can expand the words we track if other phrases/tags are used.  This will allow us to ingest the entire conversation, and not limit us to only pulling in mentions of a single hashtag.
• Twitterslurp features a leaderboard listing the top Twitter users at the conference based on volume.  Later today, we are going to expand this to feature a fuller leaderboard.  Our hope is that this directory of people tweeting about the conference will make it easy for people to make connections with others at the conference.
• Twitterslurp features a stats page that analyzes the volume of tweets that are coming in.
• We’ll be able to use our backend system to filter out spammers.  At the end of the conference, we’ll also have a database of all the relevant tweets which will allow us to do a full analysis of the conversation post-conference.

Most importantly, we’ll be releasing the code behind Twitterslurp to the open source community next so that other conferences/organizations can use the tool.

Check out Twitterslurp, and follow @bivings for the latest about the release of the tool.

I know most people are probably tired of reading about Twitter remixes, but this one is particularly well designed. It’s simple and functional, providing me with informatoin that very well may be relevant to my interests (the now).

In addition, there is a search tool and more information available for trends directly from the home page. Your Twitter credentials will suffice as an account login for TwitScoop. If only their API supported exporting these visualizations, or creating animated word clouds with terms of your choosing — there’d be some real value in that. So far it appears to restrict the API for hot trends (from their home page) only.

This is a big step forward in convenience, and it seems that a lot of people in the blogosphere are talking about how great it is for you to be able to access your activity stream, and all the activity streams of the people who trust you as friends on Facebook.

But that brings up a big question. What about that trust?

I’ve always though it was kind of weird that if a friend of yours is tagged in a photo, not only can you see that photo, but you can see the whole album, even if the person who posted it isn’t a friend of yours. Newsfeed RSS pretty much makes that possible with your entire activity stream.

RSS output allows you to not only read it in your RSS feed reader, but theoretically you could publish that feed anywhere. I could set up a public website showing all of my and my friends updates, viewable by anyone without them ever having to log in to Facebook or have any of my friends approve of it.

In the past Facebook has always been considered a “walled garden” of information in which they could control the walls. While it would be socially unacceptable to broadcast all of my friends updates, and surely against the Faceook Terms of Service, they sure have made it a lot easier to technically do it.

Anyone who reads these sites frequently is all to aware of the limits of the site’s automation algorithm.  Content that is only tenuously related is often grouped together.  The lead story on a given topic is sometimes the least important story on the topic.  The point of the news that is being broken is often missed.  The example below, which shows a story about Anna Nicole Smith being hospitalized as the lead story instead of one about her being dead, shows the just one of the kind of problems automation can bring.

Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera explained the gist of the problem in a blog post yesterday:

Any competent developer who tries to automate the selection of news headlines will inevitably discover that this approach always comes up a bit short. Automation does indeed bring a lot to the table — humans can’t possibly discover and organize news as fast as computers can. But too often the lack of real intelligence leads to really unintelligent results.

In an effort to provide better results, Rivera has hired a human editor to augment the his site algorithm.  About the decision, he writes:

Early on, when our system was less technically refined, the clearest path toward improvement involved simply iterating algorithmic development. Later, as the automation reached a certain degree of maturity, we recognized that direct editing could now improve news results by leaps and bounds. Though our roadmap contains a number of novel future algorithmic enhancements, introducing editing now appears to be a no-brainer.

Through our ImpactWatch media monitoring platform, we’ve done a lot of work on automation versus human review.  Indeed, in many ways the challenges we face on are more difficult than Techmeme since ImpactWatch does sentiment analysis as well as categorization.  After a great deal of trial and error on ImpactWatch, we’ve come to the same conclusion as Rivera: the best way to analyze and organize news is through a combination of human editing and automation.  Automation can get you part of the way, but ultimately if you really care about the quality of the analysis some sort of human editing is necessary.

The first thing you’ll need to do is get as much relevant news as possible on the topics of interest to you. There are several volume news aggregators that suit this purpose.

1. 

   Topix – As its title implies, Topix is a “topics” based news aggregator that catgeorizes all its news by specific topics. You can find a complete list of available topics here . They have hundreds of specific topics for news, although the variety of publications offered seems rather limited at this time. Topix has one of the coolest sets of trend-tracking tools which you might also find useful – try doing an advanced search and check out the trend line in the results.

2. 

   Google News – One of Google’s great successes, Google News aggregates an increasingly large number of news sources and allows you to search through them by keyword and subscribe to your serch results via RSS. Right now they are at about 4,500 sources, which is pretty fantastic for a free searchable and RSS-subscribable resource.

3.  

   

   Yahoo! News – Similar to Google News and the original force behind the my.yahoo.com (now waning in polularity), Yahoo! News aggregates from 7,000 news sources in 35 languages, again making it a great resource for what we are trying to accomplish. Yahoo! News also lets you generate an RSS feed with your search results which is necessary for what we want to accomplish.

There are other major news sites such as Microsoft’s Live Search, but none that I have found which offer the flexibility of Topix, Google News and Yahoo! News, and that also allow you to generate RSS feeds from your search results (Ask.com ‘s looks suspiciously Google-esque).

So let’s say you work at Acme Org. and your organization is interested in creating a searchable archive for monitoring general news coverage of their 3 main products, as well as the environmental impact of one of these products in particular. How would you go about this?

• First, you would want to cover as much news as possible so you don’t miss anything. Search for any mention of Acme Org. on the major news aggregator sites (Yahoo! News, Google News and Topix), sort the results by date instead of relevance, and subscribe to the RSS feeds of those searches using Bloglines.
• Enter Bloglines! Bloglines is a free web-based RSS aggregator, and as far as I know the only web-based aggregator out there that allows you to perform searches within your feeds. This of course is key to what we are trying to accomplish. Using the previous example, you would select to perform a search within “My Feeds” only for keywords having to do with Product A of Acme Org. (in their advanced search function you can also specify language here).
• This would give you all the news coverage on Product A from all the news outlets you have subscribed to. Better yet, Bloglines allows you to save your search in Bloglines or even create an RSS feed for this search result – this means you can use any RSS aggregator (the new Google Reader has a really nice interface but, unlike Bloglines, it lacks search functionality within your feeds results) and add that custom-made Bloglines feed to view all the news about Product A from there.
• Frankly, I prefer to stick with Bloglines as it allows me to search my aggregate news pool for Acme Org. really easily. You can then repeat this whole process for Products B and C and any issues you are interested in monitoring and suddenly you have a categorized and searchable up-to-the-minute archive of news about Acme Co.
• If you want to add more local news or news from specific outlets to the searchable news repository, subscribe to RSS feeds from these outlets into a new Bloglines account, search for keywords relevant to Acme Co. within your feeds in that account and then subscribe to the results from your primary Bloglines account. You’ve just added specific news outlets to your growing searchable news archive!

As a basic monitoring solution, this works really well. Try this out and let me know how this works for you. How have you used Bloglines or other RSS readers for your news monitoring needs?Of course, if you need something more exptensive there are a lot of great options out there. Including our own ImpactWatch™. Shameless plug.

After an exhaustive study of all the major online content aggregators out there, we settled on Moreover as we felt they provided the highest quality and most versatile service available to provide our clients with the kind of flexible, quality media monitoring solution they require.

Moreover has in fact been around for about as long as ImpactWatch, which is another reason we felt compelled to team up with them – it was important to us to choose a product that we felt had really proven itself in the marketplace. In the realm of media monitoring and reputation management, new products seem to come out every week – with the release of the fifth complete work-over of the ImpactWatch software just around the corner the software has gotten to the point where it is really user-friendly, scalable and extremely stable.Anyone interested can see it themselves by entering their name and email on the the ImpactWatch demo form to sign up for a demo.

The other cool thing here is that for global companies we can create versions in a variety of different languages (say Spanish, English and Japanese). Each individual user within a company has the ability to to choose which language they want ImpactWatch to render in.

Anyway, good stuff.