Auritus: Open-Source, Public Relations Monitoring Platform

The reason I started Webz.io is because I experienced the difficulties in collecting web data at scale when I worked on a previous project named PRTrack.it. At PRTrack.it we wanted to create a simple solution that will monitor how well your press release performed. We worked hard on the UX/UI but when it came to crawling and collecting web content from news sites, blogs and online forums it was far from perfect. For one, the web coverage wasn’t that great. Our clients could find more data using Google. I searched, but Google is a closed system and I couldn’t find an external API that would allow us to increase our coverage.

So you can imagine how thrilled I was to learn about Auritus, a free, open-source, Public Relations monitoring platform. Created by John Coene, Auritus provides you with a free platform that can measure and visualize multiple dimensions about your brand or product.

Auritus is currently in beta and is built with Shiny, echarts4r for the visualisations, and sigmajs for the networks. It relies on Webz.io for the data and so it taps into the same content (news articles, blog posts and online discussions) used by leading enterprises in the market.

Some of the features Auritus provides include:

• trends over time
• geographic reach
• sophistication score
• publications/Outlets
• entity relationships

Public Relations Monitoring software tends to be expensive but now with Auritus, you can set up your own media monitoring platform in just 4 lines of code. It’s a big improvement from my days at PRTrack.it, but at the same time, I’m proud to have contributed to Auritus’ end solution through our work here at Webz. I wish the Auritus team lots of success in the future