Select your favorite content sources

Sure, it's great with thousands upon thousands of content sources aggregated into one service. But sometimes you may want to check out a single source, or a limited number, or want to compare one set of sources with another. Well, in Silobreaker you can do exactly that by setting up your own publication filters and then by bookmarking the pages enable the source-customizations to be used more than once.



















Here is how you do it:

Click on "Advanced Search Options" under the search box to expand the column. In the field under "Select Publications" start typing the name of the source you would like to use (see picture below). Once you have found the source, select it and click on the "add" button.

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Repeat the steps as explained above for each source you want to add to your list.

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When you have completed your selections, click on the "search" button.

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You're done! Any search on the page you've just created is now limited to the sources that you selected.

Now bookmark the page for future use.

Click here to go to the page in this example.

If you can't find a source, please let us know about it. Simply request a source by emailing us at feedback@silobreaker.com

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The “new” open source intelligence and Silobreaker

The Tsunami that struck South East Asia on December 26th 2004 was a wakeup call for the world in many aspects. Hurricane Katrina that struck New Orleans 8 months later was another. The crisis in Darfur is here and now.

The heartbreaking stories about human loss and torn-apart families will eventually fade. The insights about what was really working in information matters will live on in the ways how we need to interact with information, knowledge and intelligence. Governments’ slow decision cycles, below-par information management and in some cases extremely hierarchical fears makes them slow to respond. Media are a little bit faster but the proliferation of information and the global scope make the validation of what people need to find, know and understand extremely complex.

But this is the world we all live in. Instabilities such as war, terrorism, environment, crime, disease, human rights issues, political upheaval, and natural disasters are global and affect us all. There is a lot we do not know and cannot foresee, but many times the writing is on the wall somewhere in the world, if we just know how and where to look for it....

Click here to read the full article from Mats Bjore, Director of Silobreaker and former Founder and Head of the Open Source Intelligence Section at the Swedish Headquarters Military Intelligence & Security Service.

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Silobreaker "Truthiness" - Business as usual in Burma

As anti-government protestors continue to face off against riot policemen in Burma, many international oil companies seem to conduct their business as usual depsite mounting political pressure for a boycott against the Burmese regime.

The view 360 page for Myanmar/Burma in Silobreaker shows that most of the related companies to the country are oil companies. A closer look through Silobreaker's relationship network gives the following picture.




















Just to explain. In the example above, Silobreaker auto-extracts, in real-time from thousands of articles about Burma, the most related companies in the energy sector - and displays them in the relationship network. By hovering over over the midpoint of any relationship the user can easily see the articles that explain the association.

Sounds complicated? Well, the equivalent manual research effort would be more or less impossible. Silobreaker offers this insight by a couple of clicks.

Click here to try it out

Kristofer Mansson - CEO


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Issue by issue - what was said during Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University.

Get more from the news by using Silobreaker's relationship networks.

The screenshot below shows the 20 most related keyphrases from the news around Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia University.

The user can simply hover with the mouse over the midpoint of any relationship to see the articles that explain the association and get an issue-by-issue breakdown of the news.

Click here to try it out

Silobreaker - Insight as a service

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The relationships or associations that Silobreaker extracts and visualizes are not pre-determined or manually configured in any way. Silobreaker deduces relationships between terms or entities statistically by computing several measurements, such as co-occurrences, text-proximity, spelling variations etc in the information flow. This enables Silobreaker to offer more insightful search results than just traditional lists of headlines (often too many) by showing people, companies, places, keyphrases, etc that are related or associated with the search results. This in turn enables the user to move away from linear analysis to multi-dimensional exploration and discovery.

Get a 360 degree view of today's stories

Silobreaker offers more insight faster by aggregating news, blogs, research, audio, video and other digital media content from proprietary, shared, user generated and open access sources around the world.

Take a look at our 360-degree search results for some of today's news events.

US

How is Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doing in New York? Click here




What's the latest in the race for the White House? Click here




Strike is in the air - UAW and GM talks break down Click here


UK
Latest development in the Madeleine McCann disappearance Click here




Gordon Brown at the Labour Party conference Click here





Bluetongue Disease - another disaster for British farmers Click here


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Silobreaker "Truthiness" - Iran/Military Action

The arrival of Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York and the controversy (amongst other things) surrounding his wish to visit Ground Zero and give a speech at Columbia University are covered intensely by media and political commentators around the world. And although it feels like Iran and the US have been at each other's throats for as long as anyone can remember, a simple look in Silobreaker reveals that the topic of a potential military attack of Iran is currently getting more press coverage than possibly ever before.

Putting his New York visit in that context, one interpretation might be that while the US is stepping up its preparations for a possible invasion, Ahmadinejad goes behind enemy lines to launch a PR "blitzkrieg" in order to gain a first mover's advantage. Fascinating tactics if the whole situation wasn't so scary!

The chart shows the number of daily articles about Iran in the last four months filtered on the topic of "Military Action". Source: Silobreaker

Click here to see the full page in Silobreaker. You need to log in to be able to go back four months (only the last 30 days if you don't log in). Registration is free - click on Login/Register button at the top of a page.

Kristofer Mansson - CEO

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Silobreaker in Sky News show

We know it's been quiet from us on the blog-front lately but watch this space as we will be providing "truthiness" reports and announcing a bunch of new features in the coming weeks and months.

Btw, followers of Silobreaker might have seen that we popped up in a press release from Sky News, who announced last week that Silobreaker will be one of two aggregators that the award-winning UK news channel will be using in a new show looking at the most popular stories, videos and debates on the web. The show, to be hosted by Martin Stanford, will air on Sky News TV channel on Tuesdays to Fridays at 7:30pm (UK time) as well as being streamed on the Sky News website.

Click here for Sky News press release

Check us out at http://beta.silobreaker.com/

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Silobreaker "Truthiness" – Middle East

We’ve had a lot of positive response on the “truthiness” report that was posted last week about the upcoming US Presidential Election 2008. So much that we will try to make these reports regular features on our blog.

Silobreaker provides more insightful results than traditional search engines by returning not just lists of headlines, but a fuller picture of people, places, companies, organizations, keyphrases, etc that are related or associated with each search result. This is a simple way of providing quick glances of instant “truthiness” that otherwise may require days if not weeks of manual research to work out.

Last week I took a look at what keywords each presidential candidate in the US was associated with and the differences between Democrats and Republicans.

Here is another way that Silobreaker can slice up the news flow. Let’s take a look at one of the most talked-about organizations in the Middle East right now – Hamas.

Q: Are there differences in the tonality of the reporting about Hamas between news sources from different countries?

I looked at sources from 5 different origins; US, Jewish, Arabic/Muslim, UK, and Chinese; their reporting around Hamas and especially what keyphrases and organizations that were associated to Hamas in such reporting (top of a list means the strongest association).

As I pointed out last week, this is not scientific research and may come with some obvious flaws (after all it took me all of 10 minutes). Real political commentators or media analysts may have very different views, but I guess one of the beauties with these truthiness reports is that they don’t take any views. They find what they find without any bias and leave the interpretation to others. Users may also find that these search results trigger questions and ideas, otherwise not thought of, leading to more comprehensive research through Silobreaker’s many other tools and features (or elsewhere).

At a first glance at the lists below, many keywords seem to be the same regardless of the origin of the source (possibly because the keywords represent the issues -but to which there are often two sides). At a closer look, however, the lists suggest more than subtle differences both in terms of tonality and the order in which certain keywords are placed on the lists. The result also suggests that sources from origins not immediately involved have a more emotionally detached and diplomatic tone in their reporting.

For instance, “Terrorist Group” and “Terrorist” are the most strongly associated keywords to Hamas amongst US and Jewish sources, while such terms come much further down the list for Arabic/Muslim sources (16th place) and hardly at all for Chinese sources (29th place).

In some more detail
Roughly 3,000 unique news articles were found in Silobreaker from the sources above in which Hamas was mentioned. All articles were in English. Blogs were not included in the analysis above.

Please note that the advanced search functionality that I used in Silobreaker to obtain the results above is not yet deployed in the beta version. Advanced search is only available in our subscription service so far, but is due to be released in the beta soon.

The relationships or associations that Silobreaker extracts and visualizes are not pre-determined or manually configured in any way. Silobreaker deduces relationships between terms or entities statistically by computing several measurements, such as co-occurrences, text-proximity, spelling variations etc in the information flow. This enables Silobreaker to offer more insightful search results than just traditional lists of headlines (often too many) by showing people, companies, places, keyphrases, etc that are related or associated with the search results. This in turn enables the user to move away from linear analysis to multi-dimensional exploration and discovery.

Check it out at http://beta.silobreaker.com/

Kristofer Mansson, CEO

Silobreaker "Truthiness"

At Silobreaker we talk a lot about “intelligent search” and providing more insightful results than traditional search engines. But what do we really mean by that and how does it translate into practical use?

Let me show you a simple example of how Silobreaker can be used for analytical purposes. This is not groundbreaking scientific research and may come with some obvious flaws, but it provides a quick glance of instant “truthiness” that otherwise may require days if not weeks of manual research (it took me about 20 minutes).

Let’s take look at what’s going in the upcoming presidential election in the US (covered quite extensively in Silobreaker here).

Q: Can Silobreaker analytically process the huge volumes of news around this topic to work out what issues are debated, which issues each candidate is associated with and what differences there are between the Democrats and the Republicans?

A: The simple answer is; yes it can!

By searching all news articles in Silobreaker for each of the candidates during the month of May and especially what keyphrases each candidate is associated with in such news flow, a picture starts to appear. I also searched on Al Gore and George W Bush to get similar perspectives for one Democrat and one Republican who are not in the race for the White House.

Real political commentators may interpret the news for the month of May very differently, but the Silobreaker analytics suggest that:

• While “Health Care” is the most commonly associated keyphrase with the Democratic candidates, “Abortion” is the equivalent keyword associated with Republican Candidates (in fact it is the top keyword for every single Republican candidate).


• “Global Warming/Climate Change” and references to “War on Terror” or “War in Iraq” make the top 10 list for most Democratic candidates, but such keyphrases are noticeable only by their absence for most of the Republicans candidates.


• “Immigration” is another keyword primarily associated with most Republicans, while “Tax” has similar associations in both camps.


• While some observers seem to think that Al Gore may still announce his candidacy, the Silobreaker analysis suggest that he has some catching up to do in terms of policies – except for environmental issues, of course, which almost entirely populate his top 10 list.


• The day-to-day issues for the current President, George W Bush, seems to have little in common with the policy-platform on which most of his fellow Republicans think they will replace him.


• Judging by the percentage share each Democratic candidate received of the total news coverage for all Democratic candidates, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama are way ahead of the rest of their Democratic peers.


• The equivalent percentages for the Republicans, i.e. each candidate’s share of all Republican candidates’ news coverage, suggest that John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney have taken a lead in the Republican camp (in terms of news coverage – good and bad) .

In some more detail
Roughly 8,000 unique news articles were found in Silobreaker for the month of May in which one or several candidates were mentioned by name. All articles were in English from some 1,000 sources around the world. Blogs were not included in the analysis above.

The relationships or associations that Silobreaker extracts and visualizes are not pre-determined or manually configured in any way. Silobreaker deduces relationships between terms or entities statistically by computing several measurements, such as co-occurrences, text-proximity, spelling variations etc in the information flow. This enables Silobreaker to offer more insightful search results than just traditional lists of headlines (often too many) by showing people, companies, places, keyphrases, etc that are related or associated with the search results. This in turn enables the user to move away from linear analysis to multi-dimensional exploration and discovery.

Check it out at http://beta.silobreaker.com

Kristofer Mansson, CEO

Beta update #1

The Silobreaker Beta has been updated. Changes include:

• A rewamped first-page, showing both blogs and updated fact sheets. You can now also see all incoming content. We hope that this better reflects the wide variety of content available in Silobreaker.
• Improved personalization experience. All you need to do now is to Log in and click Personalize This Page!
• Faster image downloads
• Improved behind-the-scenes filters to give you even more relevant results.

Try it out and tell us what you think.

Welcome to Silobreaker Blog

Hi there!

This is Silobreaker Beta Blog. We'll give you the latest news and inform you about the changes happening to Silobreaker Beta. As you might know, Silobreaker is beta-testing its new service at http://beta.silobreaker.com and the site evolves on a daily basis based on your feedback.

Don't hesitate to tell us what you think, either by commenting our posts or by sending us feedback through the feedback button on the beta site.