PubForge Blog

Somewhat related to John’s post about related news
content from Google, I’ve been looking into ways to enhance our content by including references and information
from other sources.

I haven’t had time to do more than compile some links and try a couple of apis, but the kinds of things I’m interested in include:

For News and Public Affairs content:

• references to related news stories from NPR and other sources
• references to our own related coverage
• take-action links, e.g. “how to contact your senator about this” (we’re a community station, so activism is encouraged)
• exploration, like voting records, maps of affected areas, photos, etc
  

  For music and playlists:

• concert calendars for artists on our playlist
• bio/wikipedia stuff, photos if possible
• other releases, etc

Here are some of the apis I’m looking into:

• A general overview and list: http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/04/23/the-ojb-guide-to-open-news-apis-part-1-guardian-nyt-and-daylife/

for related-stories

• http://developer.daylife.com/
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/open-platform
• http://www.guardian.co.uk/data-store

for legislator and legislation info

• http://sunlightlabs.com/projects/
• http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2009/04/20/and-the-winners-are/
• http://www.opencongress.org/tools
• http://www.govtrack.us/developers/
• http://maplight.org/widgets/apis
• http://www.opensecrets.org/action/tools.php
• http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ussenatevotesnowavailableinxml-bringonth.php

for music

• http://musicbrainz.org/doc/WebService
• http://developer.jambase.com/
• http://api.eventful.com/

I’ve started building a prototype app, just to play with the apis.  I’d be happy to share the code if anyone’s interested, though it’s in ruby so it may be of limited appeal.  The first test was: given an address, find the legislators for that district (sunlight api) and display their basic info and contact stuff along with a picture from the bioguide.

That was really simple to do; it could be useful as a take-action feature, or for stories that feature either a particular district or legislator.

Govtrack (I think) also has a map overlay that displays district information; it might be useful to lay that over a map of the station’s broadcast listening area, or as an extra layer if we started geotagging stories.