PubForge Blog

I found an interesting feature of the Google News Service. We had our RSS feeds added to Google News’ sources, so our news stories show up in the local news page. I noticed that when one of our stories showed up as a Google News Alerts email, there was link at the bottom to stories on the same topic. The url included a parameter named “ncl” that was set to the url of our story, like this: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ncl=http://www.
ksmu.org/content/view/4390/66/

So I asked myself, could I put any story url into this parameter and get relevant results? It turned out, no. But, you can get an RSS feed of your site’s news through Google News like this: http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en
&q=site%3Aksmu.org&output=rss

I found this url by searching Google News based on the “site:ksmu.org” search term. There is a link on the page for an RSS feed. The useful thing about this feed is that each story can have it’s url fed into the ncl parameter and returns a page of other stories on the same topic. The true relevance of each result is arguable, but it usually does a pretty good job. You can turn the results page into an RSS feed by adding an “output=rss” parameter, like so: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ncl=http://www.
ksmu.org/content/view/4390/66/&output=rss

You can also control the number of results by adding a “num=10″ or whatever number onto the url.

Having figured this out so far, I decided to build a Yahoo Pipe to fetch the RSS feed of our stories in Google News and get a specified number of related stories for each one. The pipe then turns this back into a stream which can be used as an RSS feed or JSON or other types. You can try it here.

I’m not really sure what to do with it now, though. How would you use such a tool?

Recalling a theme I heard throughout the Public Media Conference this year, I have been experimenting with a Google tool designed to tag and curate content. I have used Google Reader before, but never really thought it did anything that useful that my Outlook didn’t do. Then I found the Shared Items feature. What’s neat about this is not that you can share interesting information with other Google Readers users, which you can; but that you can pull in RSS feeds as well as make note of any webpage using the Google Reader bookmarklet, tag individual items, and output the stream of information as a standard RSS feed that could be subscribed to by anyone, or even fed to another CMS or social media system. This seems like a very simple way to ingest just about any kind of interesting content (text, podcast, video, etc.) and aggregate it into a standard format with very little editting or coding. I think it is a great way for staff at a media organization to share items that they think might edify their audience, and since it produces a standard format, it could easily be integrated into the organizations website or fed directly to subscribers.

 You can find an RSS feed of items that I have tagged as #publicmedia here.

It took me a long time to warm up to Twitter. On first glance, it looked like a huge potential time-suck with little payback–one more social media platform to distract my audience from my main site. I’d see that question header “What are you doing?” and the answer was always the same–trying to figure out what this is good for. However, over time I began to see instances where it served my immediate needs as a web manager, and could serve my audience. A successful strategy to use Twitter will focus on places where those two converge.

Example 1: Tweeting the pledge drive

For years, my membership director had wanted a simple mechanism to project frequently-changing messages onto the home page during pledge drives–to update totals and new members, to promote special drawings and to point to special content. Twitter makes that easy, even in environments where non-web staff are not normally able to publish directly to the website. Here’s how:

1. Open a twitter account
2. Share log-in info with the person/people who will be posting. They can either post directly from the Twitter site (http://twitter.com/yourusername), or they can download a Twitter client such as twhirl that will allow them to post from their desktop or mobile device.
3. Log-in to Twitter. Select “Apps” from the menu at the bottom of the page. Select “Widgets” from the Applications page
4. Select “other” if the feed is going to display on your domain site.
5. Choose either the Flash widget or the HTML widget. (You can control the appearance of the HTML widget using CSS)
6. Copy the code for your selected widget and paste it into the page at your site where you want the feed to appear.

This same process could be used to make the home page available to a reporter covering a breaking news story, or to report quickly evolving content such as election returns.

Example 2: Syndicating existing news and blog content automatically via Twitter

Tweeting in real time is burdensome. However, you may have content from your site CMS and from blogs that can be automatically fed to Twitter via RSS feed. Here’s how (using twitterfeed):

1. Open a Twitter account
2. Open a twitterfeed account
3. Log in at twitterfeed and select “go to my twitter feeds (or create a new one)”
4. Select “Create new feed”
5. Enter your Twitter username and password, and the URL of the RSS feed you want to send to Twitter. For best results at Twitter, configure the feed to show title only, to include the item link, and to shorten the link address.
6. Select “Create”
7. Repeat 4-6 to include multiple feeds.

Each time a new item enters your RSS feed/s, a tweet will go out containing the headline and link.

Example 3: Aggregating your content from multiple sources into one location using Twitter

One of the disadvantages of the Web 2.0 environment is that it can fragment your content and your audience across many locations. You may have a main news site, several blogs, multiple comment mechanisms, a Facebook page, a Flickr photo-sharing account, etc. Twitter provides a simple mechanism that can bring all that content together back on your site. It employs a combination of examples 1 & 2 above. Here’s how:

1. Open a Twitter account (see Example 1. above)
2. Open a twitterfeed account
3. Add all the RSS feeds for the services you want to aggregate to twitterfeed (see Example 2. above)
4. Get a Twitter widget (see Example 1. above)
5. Paste the widget embed code where you want the aggregation to appear in your page.

Now, whenever anyone posts a news story, makes a blog post or comment, writes on your Facebook wall, uploads a photo, whatever–it will appear on your main site in a single location.

At ncpr.org, I have created a map version of our Photo of the Day feature showing our last 25 selections. It works by using geolocation features at the photo-sharing site Flickr, passing the geocode feed address to Google Maps, then embedding the resulting map in the site.

Some suggested uses:

• Map a museum’s landscape collection
• Map a realtor’s inventory
• Map a social network using headshots with contact info in the caption field
• Map a travel blog
• Map a nature trail with flora and fauna photos 

Here’s how:

1. Open an account at Flickr, if you don’t already have one.
2. Upload the photos you want to map. Select “public” to make them sharable.
3. For each photo, select the individual photo, then use the “add to your map” feature in the right-hand links (under additional info)
4. Use the map tools to give a precise location for the photo.
5. After you have positioned all the photos, go to your “photostream” page at Flickr. At the bottom of the page, copy the URL for your photostream feed that is labeled “GeoFeed”
6. Go to Google Maps and paste the GeoFeed address into the search query field. The resulting map should show a location pin for each photo, which, when clicked, displays a thumbnail linked to the full photo, plus any caption text and other data you associated with the photo at Flickr.
7. To get an embeddable map into your site, click “Link” on the upper nav bar of the Google map, then copy the HTML embed snippet that displays there.
8. Paste that HTML snippet into the page at your site where you want the map to appear.

Whenever you add another photo to your Flickr photostream, it will automatically flow to your embedded map.

Enbedded NCPR Photo of the Day Map: