Kevin: Paul Miller provides a good overview of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society's Media Cloud project. Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman and Berkman Faculty Co-Director Yochai Benkler had a debate on whether the blogosphere "largely echoed traditional media or was instead a source for original news and democratic agenda-setting". Paul notes (which chimes with my own experience) "European snobbishness about the insularity of US news … may not survive exposure to this data". It uses Thomson Reuters Calais and Amazon web services.