Chipwrapper - Toolset for UK News Sources Search

A few months ago, we linked to Martin Belam's site, currybetdotnet, where he had written a comprehensive round-up of the Web 2.0 activities of the web sites of the major UK newspapers. Martin has just launched a new site called Chipwrapper, a set of tools to search the sites of major UK media outlets."The main part of the service is a Google Custom Search Engine. This allows you to search Google's index, but only see results from the major newspapers and news sources in the UK." Tools include a Chipwrapper OpenSearch plugin for Internet Explorer 7, and a Chipwrapper custom button for the Google Toolbar.

On currybetdotnet, he explains what it's all about and how he's done it:

The headline buzz is built by using a Yahoo! Pipe which takes the top ten headlines from the 11 main UK news sources - BBC, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Guardian, Independent, ITN, Sky News, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times.

A script then analyses those headlines, and makes a league table of popular words, with the dull ones like 'we', 'they', 'and', 'of' etc stripped out. The top 7 of these appear on the Chipwrapper homepage and link through to the Chipwrapper search results for that word.

The whole list is also available as an RSS feed. This refreshes every hour, and contains each word that occurred in 3 or more headlines and the number of times that it appeared.

Build stuff yourself

One of the defining ideas of Chipwrapper has been to build it using free (as in costs nothing) software and Web 2.0 tools and services. In fact, aside from the domain registration costs, and a bit of Bytemark hosting costs, it hasn't cost me anything apart from time.

I have dreams of Chipwrapper widgets and gadgets and map mash-ups well beyond my capabilities though, which is why there is a 'Make stuff' page.

This lists all of the contributory pipes, feeds, XML and bits'n'bobs that make up the service so that people can hopefully build new tools based upon it. I hope I'll be able to list those on Chipwrapper in return.

To qualify Chipwrapper's customisability, Martin has launched a Rugby Union version for the start of the Rugby Union World Cup.

(Via Pete Ashton)