Saturday, October 22, 2011
Making your own topic specific newsroom
12:53 | 
Posted by
Simon Morice
Social media has turned news upside down and now inside out. I went to the start of the #OccupyLSE protest at St Pauls last week. I wanted to capture the flavour of the start of the event for myself.
There is a phenomenal stream of information about this global phenomenon on a variety of platforms. When there is so much information you need two things: filters and searches. And you have to build them yourself.
A quick look at Twitter revealed that the Guardian newspaper and the BBC were quite actively reporting. There were many posts with several hashtags leading to articles and blogs everywhere. But flipping between sites is labour intensive; I wanted to aggregate as much as I could find into one stream.
Yahoo pipes is a sort of visual Unix tool for the Internet. The basics are not hard to learn; fairly quickly you can take disparate sources, fiter and aggregate them into a single feed. On the left hand site you can see a 'Fetch Feed' box which I used to pull in hashtags with URLs like https://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23OccupyLSX - it and its siblings return a Twitter stream in XML which gets piped off to a Union box which joins them with the other feeds. By selecting the various boxes on the pipes site you can see what each component is producing. The picture below shows a collection of feeds and filters being aggregated into an output. There is no reason why some of those feeds should not be video as you will see.
I picked up several site feeds from places like the BBC. Since they were general news feeds I filtered for words likely to return in-context content. You can read the feed in real time on the Pipes site. But I wanted something a little more convenient. For ease of consumption I built a Paper.li publication which updates twice daily. In effect I have produced my own newsroom which automatically researches the subject whilst I am doing other things. The appearance of an iPhone and iPad Paper.Li app facilitates editorial roles while mobile too.
There is a phenomenal stream of information about this global phenomenon on a variety of platforms. When there is so much information you need two things: filters and searches. And you have to build them yourself.
A quick look at Twitter revealed that the Guardian newspaper and the BBC were quite actively reporting. There were many posts with several hashtags leading to articles and blogs everywhere. But flipping between sites is labour intensive; I wanted to aggregate as much as I could find into one stream.
Yahoo pipes is a sort of visual Unix tool for the Internet. The basics are not hard to learn; fairly quickly you can take disparate sources, fiter and aggregate them into a single feed. On the left hand site you can see a 'Fetch Feed' box which I used to pull in hashtags with URLs like https://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23OccupyLSX - it and its siblings return a Twitter stream in XML which gets piped off to a Union box which joins them with the other feeds. By selecting the various boxes on the pipes site you can see what each component is producing. The picture below shows a collection of feeds and filters being aggregated into an output. There is no reason why some of those feeds should not be video as you will see.
The actual pipe can be seen on the Yahoo Pipes site.
I picked up several site feeds from places like the BBC. Since they were general news feeds I filtered for words likely to return in-context content. You can read the feed in real time on the Pipes site. But I wanted something a little more convenient. For ease of consumption I built a Paper.li publication which updates twice daily. In effect I have produced my own newsroom which automatically researches the subject whilst I am doing other things. The appearance of an iPhone and iPad Paper.Li app facilitates editorial roles while mobile too.
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