Two years ago Nieman Journalism Lab debuted Fuego -- a mobile friendly tool for tracking the future of journalism in real time, based on curated Tweets from leading players in that field. At the time, Nieman Lab director Joshua Benton noted that this approach could be applied more generally, to curate tweets from Twitter users focused on almost any niche.

Well, they've done it. This week Nieman Lab unveiled OpenFuego -- open-source code to roll your own Twitter Bot focused on the topic of your choosing -- even your own community. It allows you to easily monitor and amplify "your own universe of people on Twitter -- celebrities, tech writers, film critics, Canadians, or just people you like."

Once you download and install the OpenFuego code from Github, you can select up to 15 people ("authorities") to monitor.

Then OpenFuego follows those Twitter accounts, as well as all of the people they follow on Twitter -- up to a total of 5,000 sources. "Each and every time one of those sources shares a link, OpenFuego captures it into a database with some simple analytics. OpenFuego is running in the background 24 hours a day."

And: "You can query OpenFuego to determine which links are being talked about most in that Twitter universe. OpenFuego does some math to strike a good balance between quality and freshness, then returns a ranked list of URLs and metadata."

More details in this blog post by Andrew Phelps, lead developer of Fuego and OpenFuego -- and also an assistant editor at The New York Times and a former staff writer at the Nieman Journalism Lab.