News monitoring

DamianB · Post by **DamianB** » 05 Jul 2005, 21:53

It might be interesting to create a 'Peak Oil' index to gauge the growth of awareness. I tried search for some tools on the net but didn't have much joy. Another idea I had was to count the page numbers on Google but this seems a bit crude.

Is there any way of getting hold of data from newspapers or magazines? Any ideas?

RevdTess · Post by **RevdTess** » 06 Jul 2005, 07:02

Most lobby groups have their PR staff literally count the column inches of relevant (paper) news every day, and track this as a benchmark of their relative success in getting their point across. It's a very manual process.

Post by **mikepepler** » 06 Jul 2005, 07:14

Actually, counting the Google pages is not such a bad idea. I started before Christmas, when a search for "peak oil" as a phrase returned about 500k hits. It varies from day to day, but the trend is upwards - today it is 775k, but a few days ago it had 1.3million hits!

What might make more sense is a Google News search:
http://news.google.com/news?q=%22peak%2 ... a=N&tab=wn

nancy · Post by **nancy** » 06 Jul 2005, 07:43

I have also been tracking the number of times the words 'peak oil' have been searched on since about March this year via Overture word tracker.
It also registered around 500 then, and is now up to 11200+