Social bookmarking for journalists

This was originally published in Press Gazette as Del.icio.us social bookmarking explained and Need some background info? Just follow the electronic trail.

How journalists can use web bookmarking services to manage, find and publish documents.

Every newspaper has a library, and most journalists have kept some sort of cuttings file for reference. But what if you could search that cuttings file like you search Google? What if you could find similar articles and documents? What if you could let your readers see your raw material?

That’s what online bookmarking – or ‘social bookmarking‘ – tools allow you to do. And they have enormous potential for journalists.

There are a number of social bookmarking services. Del.icio.us is best known and most widely used and supported. For this reason this article will focus mostly on Del.icio.us.

Council elections mashup – help improve it

I’ve very quickly created a Yahoo! Pipes mashup for today’s council and London mayor elections in the UK. All it does at the moment is

• take the RSS feed for Tweetscan searches for ‘election’, ‘voted’, ‘voting’, ‘vote’, ‘Ken Livingstone‘ and ‘Boris Johnson‘,
• gets rid of duplicate results,
• and spits out a feed.
• UPDATE: Now it also takes feeds from Google News and Technorati searches for local election and the two london candidates
• It also filters out anything with ‘Zimbabwe’ in it, as reports on those elections were coming through.

I’d like to invite you to clone the mashup and make improvements. Or you can just suggest them here.

Some things I’d like to do are: add images; geo information and mapping; other feeds; filtering based on user input (e.g. location).

Meanwhile, here’s how the two mayoral candidates are faring on Twitter mentions according to a search on Twist:

Something for the weekend #6: Mashups with Yahoo! Pipes

Image by Sid05 via Flickr

This weekend’s tool-to-play-with is Yahoo! Pipes. Chances are you’ve heard of Yahoo! Pipes (it’s been around for over a year and I’ve blogged about it before) but if you’ve not played with it yet, now is the time to have a go.

Pipes is essentially a mashup tool, particularly useful for doing things with RSS feeds. And at its basic levels it doesn’t require any knowledge of programming language.

Something for the weekend #3: email meets RSS (9cays)

This week’s Something for the Weekend is email tool 9cays. At a basic level it’s a tool to help you improve group email conversations – like a mailing list with bells on. The service makes it easier to copy (cc) in people, and creates a permanent webpage so people can catch up on previous emails if they’ve just joined. But what makes 9cays interesting to me is that it also provides an RSS feed.

Having an RSS feed opens up a number of journalistic possibilities. Here are just some:

• You could carry out an email interview with a public figure – or a number of public figures - and allow people to subscribe directly to the correspondence.
• Or you could display the feed on your news site.
• You could aggregate a number of feeds from different conversations on the same topic
• Likewise you could use it to display correspondence with readers by cc’ing the 9cays conversation email address in your replies (this would however, sign them up to future emails).
• You could ask readers to cc the address in their correspondence with public figures (warning: issues around privacy and ethics here)
• If you don’t have a comments RSS feed you could set up your CMS to forward comments to the 9cays address to create one.
• Alternatively, you could set up your email account to filter comments from your blog and forward them to different 9cays addresses for different feeds (probably too much effort, but an idea nonetheless)

The fact that it’s email makes this particularly accessible for non-web-savvy readers, too. Your ideas?