I’ve been learning about blogosphere related tools for a while now. For a change, last week, Omar at Alternatives showed me a couple tools by Richard Rogers. I think those are nice uses of technology and I’m curious to see if anyone has other similar applications to share.

They focus on the modelization of social issues and trends in the media.

Check out this Election Issue tracker (Click on the Issuetracker button in the right navigation column, the one with the colored graph.

The flash app first shows you the issues that political parties campaigned on. You’ll see scrolling at top the issues that were part of an election platform, the grey zones underneath indicate whether or not the issue was part of the platform for the party listed on the left side.

Click on an issue and you’ll see at the bottom the number of times that issue was mentionned in a number of news sources in the recent days, therefore giving you a metric of the mindshare a party is getting my focusing on a given issue, without regard to the actual content (positive or negative) of the articles or the position of the party.

Infoid.org offers the Web Issue Index of Civil Society . The site is in English and largely self explanatory: The Web Issue Index of Civil Society may be likened to a consumer price index. A consumer price index watches price fluctuations in a stable set of goods for indications of inflation. The Web Issue Index watches the campaigning behaviour of stable sets of non-governmental organisations for indications of attention to social issues.

Richard Rogers maintains govcom.com with links to more goodies.