PubForge Blog

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.

Cross-posted from Publist

I thought I would throw this bit of information out there FWIW. I had been wondering how people were able to get such great meta information into the links and stories that they posted on Facebook, especially when it came to stories from news websites or blogs. I found the page on Facebook’s sharing service here http://www.facebook.com/share_partners.php. It listed several meta and link tags that help the share service work better. I added these tags

• <meta name=”title” content=”page_title” />
• <meta name=”description” content=”audio_description” />
• <link rel=”image_src” xhref=”audio_image_src url (eg. album art)” />
• <link rel=”audio_src” xhref=”audio_src url” />
• <meta name=”audio_type” content=”Content-Type header field” />
• <meta name=”audio_title” content=”audio_title (eg. song name)” />
• <meta name=”audio_artist” content=”audio_artist_name” />

systematically in our CMS, modifying the code to pick up the relevant content from the database when the page is hit. It works really well, and I noticed that Digg uses the same format, leading me to believe that this is becoming an important technique for distributing our content. I apologize if this is old hat to you, but I thought that someone else might benefit from this little tidbit.

Today, in subscribing to the Podcast for PyCon 2008, I noticed this entry:

“It almost seems like a joke: a family-owned newspaper in Lawrence, KS (population 80,000) releases an open-source web framework. It’s not a joke, of course: today Django is an increasingly popular web development platform. As an open-source community Django has been incredibly successful; in Tim O’Reilly’s OSCON keynote, he called Django “the new face of open source.” But it’s often unclear how we got here. How did a couple of programmers at a newspaper convince management to contribute to the open-source ecosystem? How does the company justify the time its developers spend on open source? And how have we as individuals and as a business had to adapt to become better open source developers?”

I was then like, “Huh! A family-owned newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas? That sounds familiar?!! Could it be? Yep, it is… Rob Curley the 2005 IMA Conference Keynote Speaker who “blew the roof off the Parc 55 with a dynamic presentation, illustrating his strategy of “hyper-localism.” Curley is one of the most decorated newspaper web directors in the United States. Some called it the best keynote speech–ever…” You can read more about his keynote speech here.

I remember coming away from the conference saying “I want to do what he does!” What an exciting, energizing person, who’s making a difference in his community and in the media industry. And now to find out that he’s doing it using open source technologies, and releasing a cool new web application framework based on python to boot! I find myself saying again… “I want to do what he does!”

I know there was some talk at last year’s conference about using Pubforge.org to support open source projects both within public broadcasting as well as independent media producers from beyond broadcast.net. I know too that, in addition to Pubforge.org , there’s always the Public Broadcasting Open Source Best Practices google group. There’s also the successful open source project from WNYC and KCRW, the East West Audio server. And there’s been collaborations that have not necessarily been open-source, like the momentum around the IMA’s with the Public Media Metrics project. But I wonder if the public broadcasting community could better support open source projects?

Tell me, what do you think it will take to foster a vibrant open-source community within public broadcasting? Tell me, what do you think it would take to have some real momentum around open-source software projects?

For those of you who came away from Rob Curley’s 2005 IMA Conference Keynote Speech and felt, like I did, that “I want to do what he’s doing!” And for those of you who would like to do this, like Rob, using a collaborative, open source approach, tell me, is 2008 the year for us to get organized? Is this year’s Public Media conference the place for us to start?

Tags: opensourcebroadcasting, publicbroadcasting

I just finished implementing the xspf flash player on KJZZ.org!

In looking at the developer’s forum, I found that cetra3 created a version which includes a Seek Button and play bar, which allows people to view where they are in an audio file as it is playing - as well as allows people to select where in an audio file they would like to listen.

I am not sure how close this is to WNYC’s audio player. I had an issue with their player not recognizing the xspf playlists as they were dynamically generated for each story (some weird 404 error in the header — likely more an issue on my end than theirs).

I’ve also put together some handy javascript to allow people to copy the code and embed this on their blog or myspace page. I’m also using the xspf file to serve random audio promos and images for the public radio talent quest.

For example, have a look at any news report at kjzz.org .

Perhaps this might be useful for other stations as well. If you have any questions about how this was done, please feel free to ask.
Tags: Pubforge, Opensourcebroadcasting, beyondbroadcast