Testing Journa-list

Did you know that Ben Webster (transport correspondent for The Times) has mentioned London 125 times in his articles since May? Or that Richard Norton-Taylor (The Guardian) currently writes more about Basra than anything else?

No, neither did I till I looked them up in www.journa-list.com. It's the website we've just launched in beta which allows you to look at news articles by journalist rather than by news organisation. You can see what articles a journalist has written, what subjects he/she writes most about, and who else has written about the same subject. More usefully still, you can build your own newsroom of favourite journalists and have their articles gathered together and automatically emailed to you every morning.

The site works by looking up the RSS feeds of the various national newspapers and BBC news online, then indexing the articles by journalist (if you want any more technical details you'll need to talk to Ben - the internet whizz whose been building the site from his cottage in the wilds of north Wales).

There's still alot of work to do (distinguishing the David Rose who writes for The Times from the David Rose who writes for The Observer for example), but it's a start. Over the next few weeks and months we'll build up the number of sources we aggregate - blogs first, then some more national publications, then... who knows? There's already a few thousand journalists on the site and it's growing every day.

This is the era - as we are constantly reminded - of information overload rather than information scarcity. Finding stuff on the net is becoming increasingly tricky as it silts up with discarded blogs, random holiday photos, embarrassing YouTube videos, and yet more BBC Facebook members.

Hopefully this site will help people filter through some of that information. It will allow people to find out more about who's writing the news, compare news coverage amongst journalists, and build up a team of writers they respect and trust.

In the meantime, while the site's in beta do let me know if you find any problems (which there will be), tell me what you think, and all suggestions as to what else we could add greatly appreciated.