At last weeks SOCITM Spring Conference I was discussing the tools I use to drive @shineynews on Twitter (www.twitter.com/shineynews). This was put together as a proof of concept for ideas that came out of Sunderland's Digital Challenge.
I have also used similar principles to drive a website for a national non-profit organisation that has 8 regional branches (see attached document).
I've been using these as examples with the Newcastle Social Media Surgery where I've volunteered.
All the tools I use are free of charge. The basic premise is to run advanced web searches and to publish these to a twitter account using a tool such as twitterfeed. You could also include these in Google Reader and iGoogle.
By running a number of search/RSS feeds for blogs, video, photos, news etc its possible to build up a single view of items on the web that the searches are finding, resulting in a passable 'web clippings' service. It does fall down however if your search term isn't unique, such as 'Newcastle City Council', 'Washington', 'Hendon' etc.
Here are some sample URLs that by adjusting the syntax you can customise to your own search term (replace SOCITM). I have left alternatives in so you can see how these work too.
News: http://news.google.co.uk/news?pz=1&cf=all&ned=uk&hl=en&q=%25%22SOCITM%22%25&output=rss
YouTube: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/videos?v=2&client=ytapi-youtube-rss-redirect&orderby=published&q=socitm&alt=rss
Blogs: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22socitm%22output%3Drss&hl=en&tbm=blg&output=rss&safe=strict
Photos: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=socitm&lang=en-us&format=rss_200
Regarding using these to drive a community online aggregator, have a look at the following interesting sites:
http://shineyrowtv.wordpress.com
Useful tools:
- alternativeto.net/ ; - find a free or SaaS version of that expensive desktop program you love but can’t afford
- www.twitterfeed.com
- www.hootsuite.com
- www.wordpress.com
- iGoogle
Google Reader sadly retired by Google but plenty similar still available. See alternativeto.net/‎- www.Eventbrite.com – events ticketing
- www.Linkedin.com
- www.surveymonkey
Regards
Graham
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Graham Jordan
Partnership Analyst
Tyne and Wear ICT Partnership www.twict.gov.uk (Address removed)
North East Region Secretary
Society of Information Technology Management www.socitm.net (Address removed)
tel. 0191 433 3790
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