Social media, consultancy, training and advice from a flâneur of the internets. Blogger, writer, broadcaster and runner of Birmingham: It's Not Shit.
August 3rd, 2009

Hyperlocal, when you don’t want everything

I’ve just created a new version (separate so as not to confuse people) of the Birmingham Hyperlocal News Wire — this one has two improvements:

1) I’ve taken the main lot of blog feeds out and re-imported as a “sub pipe” (another Yahoo Pipe used as input) — this should let me update one source only for a number of pipes — thanks to Michael Grimes for the nudge to this (hope your piping went well).

2) There’s now a second (optional) input — to those who know a little about logic or the more advanced search on Google (for example), this is a NOT field. This means that the pipe will only output items that don’t contain any word you put in here. It’s useful in situations where there is a area you don’t care about and means you get a lot of false positives (“Birmingham CIty” but NOT “Council” — if you only cared about the football team).

Here’s how the NOT addition works inside the pipe:

Pipes: editing 'Birmingham local blog wire - with NOT'

As ever, it’s for you to use, copy or augment:  http://pipes.yahoo.com/bounder/brumlocalwithnot

July 9th, 2009

Hyperlocal News Wire

Here’s a pipe I’ve created that attempts to marshal the content from hyperlocal blogging in Birmingham and allow people only to subscribe to feeds that interest them. This is a piece of investigation and experimentation that I’ve been able to find the time to do thanks to Will Perrin and his hyperlocal blogging initiative Talk About Local. Will also helped define the reason why it would be useful to do — for what he called “lazy journalists”.

Lazy here is used in the same way that it might be used — in praise — of a computer programmer; that is, lazy means you’ll work hard at setting yourself up right to make sure you get everything you need easily later on. Will got to the crux of the argument by saying that journalists interested in a subject — let’s say noise abatement issues — could easily find examples of those at a local level outside the areas they physically know.

So this is a run through of the decisions made in building it (and what other options could work), it’s no more than a prototype at this stage so comments and improvements are very welcome. However if you would rather just get stuck into the pipe itself, head on over.

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