Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple platforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it. At the time, no solution (either commercial or open source) met those requirements so we decided to build our own.

We were playing with Drupal, a solid, open-source content and community platform for different pilots. Drupal being so flexible and module oriented, we decided to write the specifications for a "super aggregator" that would help us people understand, follow and collaborate around mentions of the organization online.

We wrote the specs and sponsored the development of the software. Ian, Eric and Alex at Development Seed wrote the code and developed a very nice UI. The World Resources Institute also pitched in with a terrific set of features and here we are, almost a year later, with a very nice open source product.

Obviously, there are some quirks, a bit of noise in the signal and it could definitely have more features but it is a very useful tool for communities and organizations interested in tracking blogs, podcasts, videos, photos that talk about a specific issue.

We are expecting to improve it continuously, add new features, tweak performance etc...so stay in touch if you want to be notified of future updates. If you have installed the BuzzMonitor, we'd love to hear from you and finally, if you are a developer and want to contribute some code, either head over to drupal or drop us a line.