One of the things we'd like to do with our new site is have a newsfeed on the front page, showing what's going on. There are two kinds of news:
- news we generate ourselves; and
- news coverage we receive.
You can see some early examples of these over on the right hand column. It's pretty obvious (I think) to understand where I'm getting the news that we create (the "News from Porter Novelli" list.) Our current site automatically generates an RSS newsfeed which is updated whenever a new story is added.
What's much more interesting is the "Porter Novelli in the News" section. We pulled this together earlier than planned after some gentle prompting from our new-and-shiny CMO, Marian Salzman.
How did we do it?
Like most good ideas, it's ridiculously simple. We're using the social bookmarking site, del.icio.us to collect stories about Porter Novelli in one place, over here at a dedicated del.icio.us account. Del.icio.us creates a feed et voila!Why is this so clever? I mean, really. It's not so special?
No, really, it is! For example, because we tag the stories with names and offices, we can automagically create feeds:
- for named individuals; or
- for specific offices.
This means that - on the new site - we may be able to have context-sensitive news on relevant pages (say, for example, staff profile pages, or regional office pages.
Oh, and it's free, and took about five minutes to set up.
Wouldn't it be better if this were automated somehow?
No.
It would be relatively easy. There are lots of ways to scrape the web for news, and we already use some of them. In fact, that's partly where we find our stories.
For one thing, while we're all into the openness and the honesty, we're pleased to exercise a little editorial control over what makes it to the feed, and what doesn't.
For another, it's a good idea to have PR people reading the news. If it could all be automatic, I think we'd feel a little redundant.
And until the semantic web kicks in, we're going to need humans to do the tagging (if you don't understand that sentence, just ignore it. If you do understand it - yes we do know about OpenCalais but would refer you to our two previous points.)
What are the drawbacks?
Ok, it's not perfect. I never said that. Just simple and clever.
What if I already have a del.icio.us account?
First of all, existing del.icio.us users need to find a way to use more than one account. Logging in and out of accounts by hand is boring and slow, and that's going to cause friction and prevent adoption.
Luckily, there are some options:
- Use more than one browser, and use Firefox for your personal account and Internet Explorer for the second account (or vice versa). This would work, but could be frustrating. And there aren't really enough browsers out there to do that sort of thing more than a few times without having to do the computer equivalent of taking your shoes and socks off and counting your toes.
- Use Firefox, and get the Del.icio.us Complete add-on. If the previous sentence fills you with nameless dread ("Firefox? Add-ons? What is this strange thing you call the web?" don't worry. It's good you read this far. You don't need to know.)
- If you're lucky enough to use a Mac, the crafty gnomes at the Code Sorcery Workshop have built a tool called Pukka. It costs $16.95 - buy it. Then thank me.
It doesn't do date order
Ah, yes. Good point. Stories will appear with the most recently added at the top, not the most recent story. If we suddenly find a story from 1998 and add it to the pile, it'll pop in at the top.
A possible solution, which we haven't looked at (and don't intend to anytime soon) might be to add metadata in the form of a date tag (e.g. "20080529" for May 29th 2008). But at that point you're probably going to have to do so much other stuff you may as well start again from scratch
conclusion live with it.Little stories will push big stories down the feed.
Yep - it's a first in, first out world in the world of feeds. It's entirely possible that a few entirely trivial stories will push a lead story off the front page. But if it's a proper story, then other people will write about it and it'll be back on top like Donald Trump.
conclusion: not a real problem.
At the end of your journey please have the answers to the following...
a little editorial control...what people will do this?...how will new people be chosen to do this?
we're going to need humans to do the tagging...what people will do this?...how will the new people be chosen to do this?
Posted by: me | June 13, 2008 at 02:22 PM
@me -- how's the weather in Washington DC? (guesswork based on IP address)
Suggested workflow for any organization generating fewer than 10-20 news stories per week would be something along these lines:
1) We already have a function at most Porter Novelli offices sitting under the marketing team that collects & retails stories that mention our brand and our key staff. Finding this sort of thing is increasingly straightforward these days as more and more publications move into the digital space.
See our experimental news tracker over at http://netvibes.com/porternovelli to see how easy it can be.
These people exert "editorial control" only insofar as they choose positive or neutral stories to add to the feed.
2) We train these people to use del.icio.us - across multiple accounts - which should take less than 10 minutes.
We give clear guidelines for tagging these stories: at the moment, these guidelines are "use the full name of any Porter Novelli staff mentioned in the story but remove spaces" (so I'd be cited as "matmorrison", for example) and do the same for offices.
When we have this up and running we may push out into business areas (e.g. "healthcare").
Have I understood your question properly? And if so, have I answered satisfactorily? If not, please feel free to add a new comment, or contact me directly at mat.morrison [at] porternovelli.co.uk
Posted by: Mat Morrison | June 13, 2008 at 04:15 PM