'New Media' Makes a bit of a Comebank

Mining the term "new media" from The Wall Street Journal over the past seven years shows that it was mentioned more frequently in 2006 than at any point since the end of the dotcom era. Note the decrease in the term "dotcom" over the same period.

Information Professionals in the Text Mine

An article from the May/June 2007 issue of Information Today: Information Professionals in the Text Mine, seemed promising at first, but ended up being a bit too basic as it gives an overview text mining for business information purposes.

There is nothing new here. The lede: "With access to more information freely available, and with the help of Google and other search engines, patrons have become 'information consumers' with very high expectations...", sounds like it was written a couple of years ago. Is there nothing new to say about text mining than: It helps with information overload?

Why not talk about all the ways it is being used successfully today: media monitoring, media measuring, benchmarking, reputation managing, measuring PR efforts, etc.

Reuters AlertNet a Strong Example of Text Mining for Current Awareness Monitoring

Here's a great example of a news agency which built a Web widget and is using text mining to tell a story about a bigger picture. .
This is Reuters AlertNet's World Press Tracker. It uses Factiva's press archive. Factiva is now wholely owned by Dow Jones. This project dates back to when Factiva was half-owned by Reuters.
Here's what they're doing:

Our system analyses relevant articles from these [Factiva's 10,000 press] sources and decides whether they are about any of the 80 or so global emergencies AlertNet tracks at a given time. Emergencies are ranked according to the number of press mentions they get.