Filed under: media monitoring
Since last week’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan, mentions of ‘Japan’ over online media have understandably risen by near eight-fold over the course of the weekend. As events in the Far East continue to dominate the news, it is also worth comparing this with another story that has been in the headlines for the past couple of weeks.
Coverage of the ongoing unrest in North Africa has declined in the same space of time, with mentions of ‘Libya’ dropping over 50% between Thursday last week and yesterday, illustrated in the chart below:

For real-time coverage of both these events then subscribe to our free RSS feeds, Japan disaster news and Libya unrest news.
More importantly, should you wish to help support relief efforts in either Japan or North Africa then donate at the Red Cross here or here.
March 15, 2011
Periodically, it’s important for every company to grade itself and determine how it stacks up to the competition. A Media Monitoring company has released a video detailing the six criteria they view as critical to selecting an “online media intelligence partner.” We decided to address our performance using these six criteria. Rather than grade ourselves, however, we thought it would be more useful and meaningful if you grade us based on our responses below. So, here goes:
Coverage: 2.2 million+ sources returning 2.2 million news and social media results daily through a unified portal; ability to find non-feed-based content (e.g., academic and government sites, research group reports, company websites) by going out and collecting influential sources not on the RSS radar; delves into 800+ searchable industry categories spanning 100+ countries and 50+ languages.
Relevance: Sophisticated, cutting-edge filtering and refinement tools and an editorial review team weed out irrelevant information and spam quickly; intuitive, user-friendly search tools enable users to pinpoint their most relevant news and social media content rapidly; industry-leading “feed of feeds” using the Web’s original ping server ensures returning real-time relevant results.
Speed: Not only does the powerful weblogs.com ping server reliably gather results fast, easy-to-use tools are in place to share information rapidly via customized newsletter, email alerts, and feed sharing tools; Fortune 500 clients and the world’s leading media monitoring agencies depend on Moreover to be fast, fresh, and focused.
Analytics/Analysis: An easily learned and operated dashboard provides capability to access massive global content and filter it down to the “best of the best” results–making research and development efforts less laborious, and much more accurate and relevant; offers on-the-fly analysis (e.g., mentions of companies, people, products, events and stock tickers); enables creation and sharing of charts to simplify presentation of R&D information.
Account Service: Help is available via both phone and email; experienced professionals can help with everything from troubleshooting to training, adding new sources to assessing best ways to maximize client value; besides automated filtering and scrubbing, real people provide editorial review—enhancing both quality and quantity of content.
Adaptability: An entire suite of media monitoring and market & competitive intelligence solutions offers maximum choice and flexibility in how information is gathered, refined and shared; a comprehensive client service team stands ready to provide further customization; R&D to enhance and expand services based on client feedback is ongoing and omnipresent.
March 9, 2011
Moreover Technologies’ CODiE finalist Newsdesk 4 powers the new Precise Profile service
LONDON, Jan. 19, 2011 /PRNewswire/ – Precise, the UK’s leading media intelligence provider, and Moreover Technologies, a global leader in media aggregation, today announced a strategic partnership that offers a unique news and social media intelligence capability to the UK market.
Precise Profile, powered by Moreover Technologies’ Newsdesk 4 engine, will provide users with the first single platform access to global online news, social media and micromedia, enabling them to track an unlimited number of topics, to intelligently refine results and efficiently share them.
Newsdesk 4 has been recognized by The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) as a “Best Content Aggregation Solution” category finalist in its 26th Annual CODiE Awards competition. The winner will be announced Jan. 25 in New York.
Commenting on the service, Keir Fawcus, Managing Director at Precise said: “We are delighted to be able to respond to client demand for immediate awareness of relevant online news, social media and micromedia. It is a significant challenge to rapidly pinpoint accurate and relevant results from millions of daily news articles and social media posts and we believe that Precise Profile’s intuitive, cutting-edge search and filtering tools answer this challenge in a groundbreaking way.”
Paul J Farrell, Moreover Technologies President, said: “This is a perfect example of how companies offering overlapping capabilities can collaborate to complement each other, rapidly creating improved value for end clients. Newsdesk 4 offers a number of significant innovations in news and social media monitoring, refining and sharing, including intuitive, leading-edge faceted search and filtering tools. With its single platform for news and social media, user-friendly filters to rapidly identify relevant results from millions of daily news articles and social media posts, and powerful sharing tools, including automated alerts, newsletters and editorial feeds, Newsdesk 4 will deliver significant new insights and productivity gains to users.”
In this rapidly developing area, the Precise Profile portal delivers an easy to learn and navigate tool for monitoring coverage and produces quality results immediately.
About Precise
Precise is the UK’s leading provider of media intelligence services, providing press, online, broadcast and social media monitoring, media analysis and forward planning services in support of PR and external communications activity. Precise is retained by 5,000 agency, corporate, consumer, financial, charity and government clients including the majority of the top 100 PR agencies and over 75% of the FTSE 100.
www.precise.co.uk
About Moreover Technologies
Founded in 1998, Moreover Technologies is a trusted aggregator of global news and social media. Clients include Royal Dutch Shell, Sony, Adobe, Citigroup, Hill & Knowlton, BBC, Kingfisher, Businessweek, Reuters UK, Siemens and Simon & Schuster. Through US and UK offices, the firm offers corporate customers worldwide direct access to comprehensive, yet targeted, real-time business and consumer information from the Web’s most read and respected sources. Daily, Moreover Technologies offers unified portal access to 2.2 million news articles and social media posts from 1.8 million editorially vetted sources across 100+ countries, 50+ languages and 800+ searchable industry categories.
www.moreover.com
January 20, 2011
Since the October release of Newsdesk 4 our engineering team have been busy testing, tweaking and generally playing with things under the hood, adding more functionality to make Newsdesk an essential media monitoring tool.
The latest version now offers the ability to chart multiple feeds across all media types:

Charts can be saved and edited from My Content, as well as being exportable in CSV format. Pick from a variety of graph styles, then click and drag your way around the chart to isolate peaks in coverage and discover all the articles on any given day. This capability allows users to compare and spot trends over a wide range of media types, along with the Moreover‘s comprehensive filters and facets.
It is also possible to add charts to your Dashboard, alongside your other important saved feeds:

All in all we are very excited with the way Newsdesk is shaping up, and expect much more to come as we race into 2011 ready to keep pushing ourselves forward! Drop us any comments below or request a free trial here.
December 8, 2010
An independent review of our all-new Newsdesk 4 in FreePint’s November VIP Report reveals that this cutting-edge discovery and sharing service is fulfilling its promise.
In her conclusion, author Penny Crossland summarizes, “Newsdesk4 is a powerful search tool, providing users with links to global and authoritative sources on the web. One of its many strengths lies in the myriad of social media sources it aggregates. Searching is user-friendly and numerous filters result in targeted results – considerably more targeted than any web search engine could produce…The email and newsletter facilities make Newsdesk4 a useful tool for sharing information within corporations.”
Report excerpts confirm Newsdesk 4’s strong performance as a news and social media content search and sharing solution that “appeals to both end-users and experienced business searchers, by using standard search engine facilities and faceted search tools.” Areas addressed include:
Overall functionality and enhancements—
“Newsdesk 4 uses new technology, an improved search engine and incorporates several new features such as increased faceted search capabilities, more filters to refine searches and analytical tools…It is a particularly useful tool for media monitoring, corporate marketing and marketing communications departments and can be embedded into corporate intranets…”
Breadth and depth of social media and news coverage—
“Newsdesk 4’s social media coverage is impressive…news coverage spans numerous industry sectors…According to the vendor around 40,000 online news sources are monitored, however there is an overlap between sources when it comes to sector coverage. Analysed by industry sector, the number of sources is considerably more, reaching around 90,000.”
Global reach and presence—
“Customers are able to search for news from 148 regions, sub-regions or countries…this category also includes major cities… Newsdesk 4’s search facility covers an impressive range of languages.”
Real-time relevancy—
“Newsdesk4’s strength lies in its near real-time access to news.”
User-friendly look and feel—
“The Newsdesk 4 interface has an attractive layout and is easy to navigate. Despite a wealth of sources, categories and search facilities, the portal does not feel overcrowded.”
Robust search tools—
“…a relevancy slider, which scores articles against keywords used in a search, allows users to zoom in on the most relevant stories…I particularly liked the ‘refine’ function on the right hand side of the screen. This bar displays results according to 13 criteria, which can be used to further filter results…Advanced Search options…are all intuitive to use and self-explanatory.”
Flexible sharing options—
“At this point it is possible to clip articles to feeds or drag and drop them into feeds. The email button on the results screen allows customers to forward stories on to colleagues…The email tab on the interface enables users to set up and manage email alerts and to create custom newsletters.”
The complete Report is now available for FREE download on our website.
November 23, 2010
Gives users unified portal access to millions of news and social media results daily, cutting-edge faceted search and filtering tools.
Media aggregator Moreover Technologies announces the release of its all-new Newsdesk 4 real-time news and social media discovery, refinement and sharing service. Newsdesk 4 gives users unified portal access to millions of daily news articles and social media posts, and ability to refine results immediately using comprehensive cutting-edge faceted search and filtering tools.
“Users can capture combined news and social media coverage all in one place, then rapidly slice and dice searches in ways that will pinpoint only what they need, and discard the rest,” emphasizes Paul J. Farrell, Moreover Technologies President.
Product Manager Brian Mackie adds, “We’ve focused on the top concerns voiced by clients – ability to easily and rapidly find, process and share information. This SaaS application enables users to drill down fast to the best and most relevant search results, decide if or how to modify them, then share them easily while they’re still fresh and focused on the burning issues of the day.”
Newsdesk 4 previewers have cited ease of use of the Newsdesk 4 dashboard tools, intuitive search capabilities, and fast finding of needed content. Among discussion forum comments are: “…design is real well done,” “…very elegant application,” “…from what I’m seeing, plug and play for us,” and “…you guys are going to do great with this product…It’s a home run.”
Newsdesk 4 meets five major media aggregation aims:
- Provides multiple ways to find relevant content – including faceted search; category filters; source filters; relevance and rank filters, on the fly (e.g., mentions of companies, people, products, events and stock ticker), and pre-canned searches with cross-referencing to enable targeting relevant information without frustrating trial-and-error.
- Unifies the search for both real-time news and social media through a single conduit.
- Captures the depth and breadth of the best read, most highly regarded coverage demanded by the world’s largest companies (2.5 million results daily from more than 1.7 million-plus sources spanning 800 searchable industry categories, 100-plus countries and 50-plus languages).
- Returns clean, spam-free results that have been editorially vetted.
- Offers easy-to-use sharing tools that empower rapid and reliable distribution, including automated newsletters, email alerts and ability to maintain editorial control of feeds shared.
Mackie elaborates, “Search options abound. You can look for headlines, languages, locations, individual sources, and result digests summarized by various criteria which can be further refined. You can conduct very user-friendly Boolean searches. While sophisticated and intuitive, Newsdesk 4 also is simple and straightforward, appropriate for everyone from power users to novices.”
Newsdesk 4′s intelligence-gathering capabilities enhance strategic, tactical and operational decision-making that scales for small and enterprise businesses alike, according to Rossen Roussev, Moreover Technologies’ Vice President, Enterprise Strategy and Business Solutions.
Roussev, former External Intelligence Chief at Royal Dutch Shell, attests that Newsdesk saved his company $5 million in one year, due substantially to consolidating a variety of media monitoring vendor contracts under Moreover Technologies.
He identifies a variety of intelligence-related uses, including ability to: create an early-warning system for threats, identify emerging opportunities, compare performance and sentiments across regions, countries and competitors, refine messaging to help achieve business and communications objectives, and share all pertinent information with the right people through user-friendly distribution channels.
“Newsdesk 4 gives you a myriad of ways to find information you weren’t even looking for – such as negative information that can damage reputation, but has remained off the radar,” Mackie points out.
For more information, contact Brian Mackie, bmackie(at)moreover(dot)com.
October 20, 2010
THOMSON REUTERS OPENCALAIS SEES COMMERCIAL ADOPTION FOR MEDIA MONITORING, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, READER ENGAGEMENT, CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND MORE
Pioneering Partners Include Moreover Technologies, Morris Communications,
Media General, Magus Ltd. and Prefix Technologies
SemTech 2010 – San Francisco, Calif. – June 23, 2010 – Thomson Reuters today cited five innovative companies that are pioneering the large-scale and commercial use of its OpenCalais service to enrich and optimize digital content.
They include Moreover Technologies, a world-leading media aggregation and monitoring provider; Morris Communications and Media General, two top-tier regional publishers; Magus Ltd., the British pioneer of enterprise website governance, and Prefix, South Africa’s leading Content Management System (CMS).
“Two and a half years in, we are extremely pleased to be part of leading publishing platforms and media monitoring solutions around the world,” said Tom Tague, OpenCalais Initiative lead, Thomson Reuters. “We’re processing five million documents per day and storing 90 billion triples, reflecting a large and growing percentage of the English language news articles, blog posts and social media status updates posted on the Web every day.”
Joining CBS Interactive / CNET, Huffington Post, The New Republic, The Nation and more than 50 other publishers, entrepreneurs and service providers using OpenCalais are:
Moreover Technologies One of the original news aggregators on the Web, Moreover provides companies with “news and views” in a comprehensive solution for business intelligence, mainstream media and social media monitoring. It aggregates, refines and delivers millions of daily articles, blog posts and social media updates from more than a million editorially vetted sources spanning 800 searchable industries in 100-plus countries, and 50-plus languages.
Moreover Technologies uses OpenCalais to categorize and tag news and blog content as well as social media status updates to provide superior mainstream and social media monitoring services to clients of all kinds.
”Equally important to quantity of information is quality,” said Paul Farrell, President of Moreover Technologies. “It’s imperative to be able to retrieve rapidly the most relevant and pinpointed results possible from vast repositories of business intelligence. Our partnership with OpenCalais substantially enhances our ability to make sure clients get the right results at the right time.”
Morris Communications A leading southeastern media company, Morris Communications has newspaper, magazine, outdoor advertising, radio, book publishing and online properties. Its digital arm, Morris DigitalWorks, turned to OpenCalais while digitizing the archives of its 13 daily newspapers, including the Augusta Chronicle; the Florida Times-Union; the Savannah Morning News; the noted local Journalism experiment Bluffton Today and more.
“We strive to be unrivaled in the delivery of local news and information to our readership in every possible medium. So it is essential to be able to repurpose our content for any number of uses – including digital distribution on the Web, mobile, etc.,” said Michael Romaner, President, Morris DigitalWorks. “OpenCalais has helped us achieve that mission in two ways. By improving the relevancy of our content for Web searches, we have increased both our overall page-views from search engines, and our retention of those readers once they arrive. We look forward to expanding on this successful alliance.”
Media General A publicly-owned communications company, Media General has interests in more than 35 newspapers, 15 television stations and a wide array of interactive media properties. Media General turned to OpenCalais when porting 60 of its content-rich sites – including The Tampa Tribune; the Winston-Salem Journal; and the Richmond Times-Dispatch – to a new CMS for superior Search Engine Optimization (SEO), improved content navigation and greater utilization of archived articles.
Magus Ltd Magus is the pioneering UK company behind ActiveStandards™: the market-leading SaaS platform for enterprise website governance used by Unilever, Shell, Philips, ING and more. ActiveStandards takes web content governance to a new level by enabling companies to coordinate the policies, processes and people that underpin their web presence within a single integrated framework, and monitor and manage compliance.
Magus uses OpenCalais to power ActiveStandards’ “Content Insight Reports” – a suite of powerful semantic reports which extend the reach of online governance by providing visibility and control over unstructured content.
“Semantic Web technologies are revolutionizing the way people find and use information online,” said Simon Lande, CEO, Magus Ltd. “Our alliance with OpenCalais enables us to leverage this technology to bring about a step-change in the way that companies monitor and manage their online content. We see it as a revolution in content governance.”
Prefix Technologies Provider of South Africa’s most popular off- and online CMS, Prefix is a trusted Web-applications development company. Prefix solutions enable magazine, newspaper and online publishers to collect, store, share and monetize content in new ways that increase competitive advantage while improving efficiency and reducing costs.
Prefix uses OpenCalais as a processing layer for Preditor’s Semantic Tagging Engine. With a powerful tagging rules toolkit on a per-magazine basis, Preditor customers with multiple magazines on Preditor are able to draw content out of their archives and build smart links across a the network for their readers. In one case study, they’ve scanned through and linked over 10 years of archives.
”We’ve seen significant increases in archive monetization for our customers with our OpenCalais implementation. Equally, it’s been incredible to explore new ideas in both the print and digital worlds to create content packages through semantic discovery,” said Josh Adler, CEO, Prefix. “We feel we’ve interpreted the semantic opportunity in a unique way for traditional media and OpenCalais opened that door for us.”
About the OpenCalais Initiative
The OpenCalais initiative supports the interoperability of content and advances Thomson Reuters mission to deliver intelligent information by connecting all the world’s business-relevant content. It offers free metadata generation services, developer tools and an automatic connection to the Linked Data cloud. Found at OpenCalais.com (http://www.OpenCalais.com), OpenCalais is the fastest, easiest and most accurate way to tag the people, places, companies, facts and events in content to increase its value, accessibility and interoperability on the Web. For a quick and easy demo of how OpenCalais can add intelligence to your content, visit http://viewer.opencalsis.com, paste in a news story and hit submit.”
About Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals. We combine industry expertise with innovative technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, tax and accounting, healthcare and science and media markets, powered by the world’s most trusted news organization. With headquarters in New York and major operations in London and Eagan, Minnesota, Thomson Reuters employs 55,000 people and operates in over 100 countries. For more information, go to thomsonreuters.com.
Contact:
Krista Thomas
Thomson Reuters OpenCalais Initiative
415.202.3523
Krista.Thomas@ThomsonReuters.com
June 29, 2010
Hot on the heels of our recent announcement concerning a whopping 390% increase in the number of social media sources we monitor we’re pleased to say ain’t finished there.. This week our social media sources numbered over one million for the first time, grabbing around 1.5m individual posts a day, looking something like this :
We fully intend to keep driving forward not only with our social media sources, but news as well, and ensure we offer the most complete media monitoring solution out there. So thanks to the Team for all their hard work in getting us here and we’re already looking forward to the next million!
June 11, 2010
Aggregation pioneer marks one-year milestone with new Social Media Metabase portal, expanded news coverage, new search engine tools, new publisher product, new mobile app
Reston, VA—Aggregation pioneer Moreover Technologies has moved aggressively on their mission to solidify the top spot in breadth and depth of social media and news capabilities in the year since a private investment group acquired the company from VeriSign, Inc.
According to company President Paul J. Farrell, investment team leader, “The ink on the May 2009 acquisition contract wasn’t even dry when a product team started expanding our social media and news presence to help our clients monitor what’s happening, identify trends, and use the information to enhance their customer support and marketing services. This was one facet of an overall strategy to address many challenges at once, beefing up combined news and social media monitoring and improving our analytical tools.”
Leading the way is a newly launched Social Media Metabase business intelligence portal with expanded content filtering, sharing and analysis tools. This repository includes 976,000 spam-free, editorially reviewed White List feeds providing 1.4 million average daily posts refined from more than 12 million sources. “We cover all the Web’s most prominent social media sources, commentators and discussions,” notes Product Manager Brian Mackie. “A year ago, the Metabase contained 250,000 feeds, chiefly blogs and podcasts, with 500,000 posts. That’s a 280 percent increase in posts coupled with a 390 percent increase in sources.”
Moreover’s social media universe includes forums, microblogs, consumer review sites, video and photo sharing sites, wikis, social networks and comments, including such key sites as YouTube and Twitter.
The new Metabase portal provides detailed source lists and indexing statistics, giving customers more detailed insight into coverage. Other enhancements include comprehensive categorization and metadata tying to country, language, publishing platform, topic and media type. Quantity of tagged feeds, and countries, languages and platforms covered is constantly growing. Currently, Moreover indexes more than 100 countries and 50 languages.
Also noteworthy is the impending combination of the Social Media Metabase and News Metabase into one portal. “Having the news and social media all in one place will provide clients the ability to understand connections between the content. This shows metrics we can support, analysis of data returned, most linked sources, and the most salient pieces,” emphasizes Mackie.
News coverage also is up considerably, with 218 percent growth in average daily article count to 600,000 from 275,000; and with a 15 percent increase to 35,000 sources.
Farrell notes, “To help fuel our growth, Moreover has more than doubled the size of our client service team, enabling our clients to filter through all the noise and identify the information they are seeking.”
Moreover Technologies’ Search Engine Toolkit (SET) now offers a search API across all news and social media types (versus just news a year ago), offering “direct query access to our index for custom feeds and search implementations,” says Mackie. “It’s fairly plug-and-play, and goes in some pretty fancy directions. We can provide very specific content by topic, news and social classifications.”
Other value-added applications, such as Moreover’s Newsdesk, sit on top of SET. Newsdesk provides an intuitive dashboard that enables access to breaking Web news and fast creation of branded information-sharing tools such as newsletters.
Responding to publisher interest in monitoring and complementing how and where their Web content appears, Moreover Technologies has developed the MetaMonitor content discovery application. MetaMonitor enables publishers to compare and contrast details of original and republished content. “It’s a great analytical tool for publishers,” notes Farrell.
Rounding out first-year accomplishments, Moreover Technologies also launched an iPhone application as part of a wider mobile strategy.
For more information, contact Ryan Roe at salesinfo(at)moreover(dot)com.
###
Since 1998, Moreover Technologies has been a trusted aggregator of global news and social media. Through US and UK offices, the firm offers corporate customers worldwide direct access to comprehensive, yet targeted, real-time business and consumer information from the Web’s most read and respected sources. Daily, Moreover Technologies aggregates two million news articles and social media posts from more than a million editorially vetted sources across 100+ countries, 50+ languages and 800+ searchable industry categories (statistics as of June 2010).
June 9, 2010
Organized or Overwhelmed? Almost universally, employees feel frustrated and overwhelmed when they can’t put their hands on needed business intelligence quickly.
Compounding the situation today is the widespread expectation that people will be able to find and share information rapidly, given the rise of digital files and explosion of mobile as well as on-site communication and collaboration options.
In a paper world, hours or even days might have been the accepted standard. Now, it’s often minutes—or even seconds.
A clear message emerges from all this: Information that’s well-organized and easily accessible by all authorized users will drive up employee productivity and customer satisfaction ratings.
Conversely, employees underperforming for any reason, including frustration over lack of organization, are costing companies a lot of time, which translates into money.
World-famous Gallup, the polling company, notes that in an average organization, 40% of employees aren’t performing optimally (based on a ratio of 1.5 engaged for every 1 disengaged employee). In contrast, world-class organizations have an 8:1 ratio, according to Gallup findings.
Other findings show that when someone is interrupted by a distraction, such as trying to find information in a disorganized venue, it takes roughly a half-hour to get back on track.
Conversely, according to a survey from the Global intelligence Alliance (GIA), a global market intelligence firm, “Systematically organized market intelligence operations report time savings of at least 1.5 hours per week per end-user…about 9.5 days a year per end-user.”
That’s a lot of money annually PER employee. This addresses the importance of having an organized, digital way to access and use information. In content aggregation, monitoring and sharing, this leads to several conclusions:
1. Having a single-source provider of all business intelligence—news, social media, and even non-feed articles—helps companies organize and keep track better than when multiple suppliers are involved;
2. Digital trumps paper in so many ways—speed of getting information in and sending it out, mobile access, ability to filter and refine relevant business intelligence from huge numbers of sources, articles and posts…the list goes on and on;
3. User-friendly digital distribution tools play a major role in the well-organized workplace. Ability to capture and re-distribute business intelligence rapidly and reliably saves time, money…and sanity.
May 21, 2010
Next page
Previous page