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Download Sweeper V0.3 Now - Click Here!

Hi all you Swiftriver and Sweeper followers out there.

The Swiftriver team is over the moon to announce the launch of our latest version of the Sweeper app.

Those of you who have been following our progress will know that this release comes hot off the heels of the V0.2 that we pushed to you all a couple of months ago.

As always, the Swiftriver guys and girls have had their heads down crafting and coding some great new features that go a long way to making Sweeper bigger and better than ever before.

So, what can you expect to see out of the V0.3 release?

The Sweeper Dashboard

Users of the new release will be greeted by a lovely shiny new dashboard that makes use of our custom built analytics module and the great jQuery graphing library jqplot [http://www.jqplot.com/] (thanks Chris for this easy to use and powerful tool). You can expect to see a lot more data visualisation in upcoming releases and we intend to utilise the power of the new analytics module throughout the Swiftriver family. 

Tag Based Navigation & Channel Based Navigation

Building our powerful tagging service, the latest version of Sweeper now offers users the ability to refine their view of content based on tags that are important to them. Simply click on any tag in the content list and see the list repopulated with only content that contains that tag!
Want to compare and cross check what people are saying on Twitter with what they are posting to flickr? Well now you can with Sweeper V0.3. The new channel based navigation filter makes it dead easy to view only content collected by a specific channel while still continuing to collect and process content from all over the web.

 Content Clustering

This is a great new tool that allows you to see how similar other content is to a new piece of content. Make sense? Well basically, every new piece of content that comes into Sweeper now has some scores attached to it, showing you how its set of tags match up to the larger set of tags in the system. To make this really relevant, we first show how similar this content is to all other content, then we show how similar it is to content you’ve already marked as ‘accurate’. We expect this feature to grow and grow and the Swiftriver team think this will be a key metric in the battle to cut through the noise and get down to only really interesting content.

Content Refresh Message

The new version of Sweeper keeps you updated with messages about how many new pieces of content have been collected!

As always, we didn’t manage to cram everything into this release that we would have liked to – but no worries, it just makes the next release all the more juicier!

So before I go, I can give you a little taste of some of the things you can expect to see from the next release:

•  Revised Sweeper Panel
  We have been doing some work internally on improving the user workflow around voting on content, expect the next release to have some jazzy new buttons for you all to press!
•  Pluggable Content Ordering Module
  Building on some of the great statistical tools we have in Sweeper already, the next release will ship with a whole new plugin framework (in addition to our Parser and Turbine models) that will allow you to change the order in which content is delivered based on things like location, RiverID score, tag clustering etc. And because it’s pluggable, you can dream up your own wild and wonderful ways of sorting the quality from the noise!

Well that really is it for now. Thanks for following our project and please get in touch if you have any issues, suggestions or would like to contribute.

Thanks as always to the Swiftriver team and our brothers and sisters over at Ushahidi for making it all possible!

Matt

Director of Platform, Swiftriver