Talking wires
I’ll be prattling on about how I publish kigaliwire at BBC TV Centre later today. Who will be the first to yawn??? Hope I make sense…
Giving a talk about online distribution & collaboration in London next week. Looks as though I’ll be repeating it a few times. Here’s me notes.
A few more visitors this morning… this’ll be the last of these for a while. Interesting to see. That is all.
Interesting… Google found the site very quickly once I took the password protection off. Wonder if that’s because of all the links I’ve been adding to pictures I’ve added these last couple of months? Both kigali wire and kigaliwire searches differ a lot from yesterday.
I peeled off the password protection to kigaliwire a few hours ago, sent a tweet out and a picture across the network. Interesting to see who clicked through, or rather where the people who clicked through are located - I’ve no idea who actually clicked through. Apart from a few sympathetic friends :) Anyway, 200+ hits and 70+ uniques.
Early search results on kigaliwire and kigali wire - be interesting to see how this changes (if at all…) when I turn the site on.
Talkin' 'bout my distribution
I’ll be doing a series of talks in London next month about online newsgathering, publishing, distribution and transparency. Think I have the ten key tools nailed now. Here they are, in no particular order:
- publish2
- pixelpipe
- tubemogul
- namechk
- creative commons
- bit.ly
- statcounter
- rss/yahoo pipes
- tweetgrid
- netvibes
Also thinking about frontlinesms - to bridge the mobile-but-no- internet divide.
That’s 75 different destinations now set up - minus a few of the video sites which I’ll get to if and when I ever shoot any video - The key ones I’ve spent a wee bit of time nurturing are twitter, flickr and less so - but still a bit - on delicious.
Twitter plays the key role in getting info out there, delicious is an easy way to plug external news via an RSS feed into the site sidebar and flickr is great for “community building”. In addition, I’ve come to really like posterous, mobypicture and pikchur - both are great mobile photo blogging sites which I’ll be doing a lot more with.
I really need to formulate a plan to really work on each tool in a systematic manner to see who is using it, who is interested in Rwanda/Africa etc. All a bit disorganised on that front at the moment. I doubt I’m going to find a lot of folk deeply interested in Rwanda and I’m wondering if the time and effort involved in the hunt will be worth it… so, loose monitoring it is for the time being.
Also, I have yet to add any live video sites like qik, ustream and the like - I’m thinking of buying a new iPhone in Europe that I could hack to use qik. Or possibly getting some kind of data account and using an old Sony Ericcson K800i for live video on the go - but this is not a priority for the time being.
How I gather and distribute news. The Achilles heal in this method - or one of them… - is Yahoo Pipes. It is slow, clunky and unreliable, but it is the only way I am aware of that allows me to search, aggregate, filter and sort stacks of different sources and spit them reasonably intelligibly out the other end into an RSS reader for me to take a nose through. There must be a better way though, surely.
Pic taken from there.
Decided to rethink the whole site away from “news” to more about the social media experimentation I’m doing with kigaliwire.com A couple of reasons for this:
- One of my main interests is how to publish and distribute information online and that is one of the major factors why I set the site up. As such the whole site is an experiment in publishing and ferreting out those souls who are online and interested in life in Rwanda.
- I do plan to get press accreditation at some point - although not if it’s still $1,000 per year (ouch) - and start doing some original reporting, but my main focus at the moment is not “doing journalism” in the traditional sense, it’s more about point one.
So, kigaliwire - for the time being at least - will be a bit of a social media experiment. Hence the rethinking going on in the sub-header name department above.
I’ve always thought of the web publishing process as being very much a porous medium, a bit like a sponge - you soak stuff up and drip it all over the place - the place being the Internet - if you catch my drift… Some people call this, a bit high fallutingly, as using the web as a whole canvas. I prefer my sponge.
Breaking news? Hmm...
The thing is, the Breaking News left hand sidebar is an RSS feed manhandled from delicious.com/kigaliwire into the WpNewspaper template and does not update in real time. It can take hours to arrive on kigaliwire.com This is probably not a big problem as anything really unltra-urgent will get tweeted and possibly blogged - and so “it’s out there” - but I wonder if there is an easy way to speed up the RSS feed flow into kigaliwire.com. Hmmm…
Decided to make the “front page” feature content more “free” Anything goes basically
