Due to a recent change at the BBC, Revisionista can no longer properly detect changes in articles. To fix this, I’ve brought forward plans for a new version of Revisionista. This should be up and running within a couple of weeks.

The new version will fix these problems, but also make it much easier to fix if things change again in the future. It will be much easier to add additional news sources too – so stay tuned for a great new Revisionista.

In the mean time, sorry for the inconvenience.

UPDATE: The BBC seem to have made more changes and now Revisionista is working again, thanks BBC!

The Register used News Sniffer’s Revisionista to track the changes of a BBC article on the ID cards.

The report’s revision history, documented by News Sniffer, takes us on an impressive Odyssey from “Smith to unveil airport ID scheme”, through “Shops may take ID Card biometrics” to the final sales-pitch version, cunningly deniabled with quote marks.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/14/bbc_stories_cant_wait/

News Sniffer was down for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon whilst I upgraded the software that runs it. This fixes a few display bugs and more importantly patches up another problem where bbc comments were being misclassed as censored. The misclassification was due to a mistake when handling british summer time, so it’s only been prevalent since the end of March. We double checked all censored comment from the last few months and removed any misclassified ones.

Due to the downtime whilst we cleaned and reindexed the database, some news articles and bbc comments were not added to the database so will not be tracked. So, if you’re looking for a particular news article published yesterday afternoon, it’s likely that it is missing. Apologies for the inconvenience.

The biggest new feature is vastly improved search system.

It works like most search engines, so just type keywords in and you get results. You can be a bit more advanced too though. Say you want to find all censored bbc comments by the author ‘John Smith’. Do a search for:

author:"john smith"

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News Sniffer now has its own domain name: www.newssniffer.co.uk
The old address (newssniffer.newworldodour.co.uk) will automatically redirect you, but update your bookmarks!

Apologies but due to a VPN problem, News Sniffer has not been monitoring news articles or Have Your Say forums for the last 2 days. All working again now though. I’ll set up some alerting system to prevent this happening again.

The BBC Editors blog has mentioned News Sniffer today.

It’s largely just marginalised us, but it’s rather ambiguous. When they suggest that Revisionista will not find examples of bias, I can’t decide if they mean that the BBC is not biased, or that they are just very good at it.

Some of the recommended revisions are interesting, but maybe we need a comments feature so people can explain and discuss their recommendations.

And they also describe their censoring of ‘Have Your Say’ comments as “censoring” in quotation marks. I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean either. Is it not censorship when they remove comments? Or do they not remove comments?

See the top recommended censored comments for some interesting examples of “censorship”.

News Sniffer blipped on the BBC radar this week. Someone mailed their public “backstage” mailing list with a link and it eventually turned up on the backstage.bbc.co.uk blog.

Richard Sambrook, Director of BBC Global News, has commented too.

I’m not sure why he’s so Interested in what my name is, but I’ve added it clearly to the about page now. It’s not like it was a big secret.

An ex-BBC employee, Martin Belam, commented extensively on it too.

I also got invited to discuss News Sniffer on the backstage mailing list by Ian Forrester of the BBC. An archive of the mailing list is available. With a notable threads starting here. I posted some details of the inner workings of News Sniffer too.

In drumming up some more attention for News Sniffer, I e-mailed the Biased-BBC blog which then linked us in a posting. Some comments on their post brought up the issue of News Sniffer Bias. Here is a quick response I put together:

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I rolled out the new version of News Sniffer last night. It’s mostly changes to Revisionista:

• The Guardian and Independent World and UK feeds added to Revisionista
• Voting system for Revisionista versions. Recommend interesting revisions for others
• Recommended revisions list and RSS feed
• The Revisionista revision list displays the latest title
• Tweaked the Revisionista layout to be a bit cleaner
• Added some more stats to the front page summary
• The Revisionista search now includes titles
• A few performance tweaks

The search system is a little crummy at the moment. I have plans to add a more advanced searching system in future.

Anyway, get recommending revisions!

Since the Lenin’s Tomb blog linked us, traffic has snowballed. News Sniffer has now appeared on Metafilter.com, Democratic Underground, Digg.com and a whole bunch more.

We even made it onto the BBC Radio 5 Live discussion forums. I imagine they’ll censor that though

UPDATE: Medienbote, Germany’s daily media industry newsletter also featured News Sniffer.

Also, I noticed a link from what looks like an internal BBC development web site (they use MoinMoin as their wiki software ).

I was interviewed by Austria’s public service broadcaster, Österreichischer Rundfunk. The article is here in German. My actual e-mail reply to the journalist follows.
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