Tracking People in the News with Newsle by Angela Guess.
From the post:
Newsle.com, a web app that tracks people in the news, has released a new version featuring instant news alerts about users’ friends, colleagues, favorite public figures, or themselves. The startup also announced $600,000 in seed funding from Lerer Media Ventures, SV Angel, and an independent investor. According to the company website, “Newsle’s private beta launched in January 2011, and was covered by TechCrunch. The current version is a major evolution of the original concept. Newsle now combs the web continuously, analyzing over 1 million articles each day – every major news article and blog post published online, as well as most minor ones. Newsle’s core technology is its disambiguation algorithm, which determines whether an article mentioning “John Smith” is about the right person.”
If the disambiguation algorithm is accurate enough, perhaps Newsle can sell results to the U.S. government and other interested parties.
At least then the government (or even private corporations) would not have to reinvent the wheel. Not to mention having a line item in the budget against which to judge ROI.
If tracking all the members of U.S. college cheerleader teams in the news for some term of years has yielded no terrorist leads, time to shave that off of the data stream.