[Marketing] FT launches Newssift

[Sean DALY]

Marketers,

I'd like to draw your attention to the new Financial Times search
portal, Newssift (site: http://www.newssift.com , PR:
http://sev.prnewswire.com/banking-financial-services/20090318/NY8596418032009-1.html)

It's a news article aggregator trying to fulfill a similar need to
Daylife (http://www.daylife.com) which applies heuristics to estimate
pie-chart percentages of:
1) positive/negative/neutral sentiment
2) article source, by media

Newssift also matches topics like Daylife, but types them: Business
Topic, Organization, Place, Person, and Theme.

Search results can be refined with fulltext or picking a typed theme;
each refinement link in a chain can be adjusted, typed themes on a
dropdown list; and queries can be saved and retrieved.

I must say I am impressed with FT Newssift's search results for "sugar
labs", although the number of spidered articles on us is too small
right now for meaningful statistics. A search on "one laptop per
child", however, when sorted by date (my usual settinng for Google
News) shows that our press release, picked up by Xconomy which already
had a high Newssift relevancy ranking from Walter's previous
interview, appears in the top results.

Note that blogs are not spidered and ranked Technorati-style, but
staff at Newssift individually identify influential bloggers by theme
and spider them.

Although designed for investors, such a tool can be a useful way to
spot-check the "temperature" during extensive media coverage; in
particular, Newssift can take some of the guesswork out of guaging the
impact of a negative online story (Slashdot or ITWire for example) on
the hundreds of more established trad and printed publications.

And, most of all, it can help us identify news stories which *should*
have mentioned Sugar and provide us with an opportunity to send
information to the journalist who will hopefully cover Sugar better
next time.

thanks

Sean
Marketing Coordinator