Presentation about how to distribute news and information across multiple social media services using freely available tools. This is how I currently work producing kigaliwire.com
Presentation about how to distribute news and information across multiple social media services using freely available tools. This is how I currently work producing kigaliwire.com
The “old way” of publishing and distributing news is cumbersome, expensive, a bit broken, a bit out of date and late.
Doing journalism is expensive
Today we’re going to focus on distribution and how this works online
because the old way is unsustainable. It reportedly costs the New York Times $644 million per year to distribute the print edition -
Mainstream media have been working on the new way for quite some time. For at least 28 years...
And they still can’t make it pay
All the tools I use to distribute news about Rwanda are all online and (currently) free.
The main drivers across all the tools I use and keywords, tags, links and hashtags on Twitter and similar tools.
In this short video, Alan Rusbridger, Guardian editor, explains why Twitter is useful for journalists; for collaboration and distribution of news
make sure you can occupy the internet with your unique name - you don’t want a name that’s already been nabbed.
It is a little time consuming, but if you tell people how you are working and why, you might learn of better ways to do things - and on the internet is good to be straight up.
Even old notes and scrawls can have value
A little on my situation in Rwanda and how the processes I’m going to describe are purely experimental and quite possibly not best suited to a developing country in East Africa... But I’m looking at this developing much more effectively 3 years down the line, not how things stand today.
As listed in the Reporters without borders 2009 Press freedom index
I don’t have press accreditation - not at this price - the fee is reportedly coming down very son to a far more manageable $100 per year. As such, kigaliwire is pretty much a photoblog come news aggregator at the moment - original reporting will have to wait a little.
We keep hearing about the arrival of superfast broadband in Rwanda - but it’s not here yet - this is the cable that connect me to the world. It’s just outside my front door in Kigali. It costs $133 per month to have medium speed internet from Rwandatel at home. Speed varies greatly throughout the day; from pretty quick, to a complete stop.
Publish2 is a social bookmarking site specifically for journalists with a number of useful collaborative tools and a tip box feature
find a news story
Click the bookmarklet and editorialise the info bearing in mind where the link is heading - publish2, delicious, twitter, your new website - have to keep in mind the end destination.
When you save the bookmark, it will appear on the Publish2 website - I have a small netowrk here mostly consisting of foreign correspondents, foreign desk editors and those interested in African news.
The link also appears on Twitter which is by far the most highly engaged community I have discovered online interested in discussing and sharing information about Rwanda.
The link also appears on the excellent social bookmarking site - delicious.
The RSS feed from my account on delicious then feeds into the kigaliwire.com website in the breaking news column.
With publish2 I can quickly distribute information across these four sites each of which has a network of between 1 and 350+ people
Pixelpipe helps you wire up 100 or more online services. I use it to distribute photos, tweets, links, blog posts and audio. Sign up and add all the social media services you use - I spent 3 months or more slowly adding new services for kigaliwire. I now have around 80 different accounts.
Take a photo - this is my taxi in Kigali
And upload from the pixelpipe website
The photo immediately appears on all the photo sharing sites I have wired up like 23HQ
And ipernity
Flickr
On each photo sharing site I am building small communities of folk interested in Rwanda and this part of Africa and alos just those interested in photography.
Pixelpipe also works from my mobile phone - there is an iPhone app whcih will work on a data network and/or wifi - throw in a couple of editing applications and I can publish on the move.
Hellotxt is similar to pixelpipe but allows me to send updates and photos and other media to yet more sites. I use pixelpipe to send updates to hellotxt which in turn send them on to a bunch of other sites
A video distribution tool - like pixelpipe but focussed solely on video
Watch this short video to see how it works.
Bit.ly is a url shortener with useful statistical analysis. Short urls are important for services like twitter where space is at a premium.
Raw RSS feeds from a number of news sites and filtered feeds sent through Yahoo Pipes are the main online information sources I use for kigaliwire. Feedburner allows me to make RSS feeds easily available and people can subscribe to the website via email using feedburner. It also allows me to open up the information on the website for others to build things with - not something I’m looking at doing, but it make the site yet more “porous”
Yahoo Pipes is a fantastic tool for gathering, filtering and sorting huge amounts of information - the only downside is it’s a wee bit flakey, slower than straight RSS and needs a little bit of a learning curve to figure out how to set it up - it does, on the other hand, greatly improve your understanding of how RSS works and how data flows across the Internet.
In fact Kigaliwire grew out of a Yahoo Pipe experiment to filter news for different countries, issues and send it into twitter as a world news wire service using twitterfeed
the idea was/is whenever a country or issue “kicks off” I would turn off the auto twitterfeed updates which are ugly, slow and not 100% relaible...
And go human....
If there is a breaking news event in Haiti I could theoretically turn the twitterfeed tap off and update things manually in a more web-twitter friendly manner.
During the Iran troubles, Iranwire was getting retweeted alot, but there was no human doing anything - it’s just an autocustom built newsfeed coming out of Yahoo Pipes. A human could add so much more value - that’s what I hope @kigaliwire is doing for those interested in Rwanda.
I am starting to send my updates and blog posts trhough Afrigator - an African blog search engine and aggregator - more likeley to get kigaliwire discovered if I let it swim in a pool where people are looking for Africa focussed informations. Afrigator also has a twitter like service called gatorpeeps - I send all twitter updates to gatorpeeps too.
More a monitoring tool than a distribution tool - I use tweetdeck and/or tweetgrid to monitor twitter for talk about rwanda using live keyword searches
It’s like a social newswire, come tip off service
Pingomatic allows me to tell a wide variety of blog search engines whenever I have update kigaliwire.
I use Netvibes to aid in the transparency practice - I send all raw feeds of information I have coming to my desktop into a publicly available version on netvibes. You can do similar with igoogle and google reader, but netvibes is a very flexible alternative. it also allows me to work when I’m away from my desktop or just on my mobile.
But you can never rely on any of these online services to work all the time - they are online and they are free - so what do you expect?
Now, I fully realise this is a hell of a scattergun approach, but as I mentioned at the beginning this isn’t about how things stand at the moment - this is about 3 yrs down the line.
Throwing all this information about Rwanda into a tonne of different “rooms” on the Internet may, in 60%-%80 of cases - be futile. Even though I’ve only just started on this, I can already see sites like Plerb, Kwippy and Jaiku are pretty useless for talking about and disseminating information about Rwanda - but I can add new services as they come along and drop those that don’t work as and when
One of the key tasks is to try and foster debate on those sites where people are discussing Rwanda
Find the “rooms” where you can entertain folk - discuss Rwanda in a more lighthearted way, discuss the quirkier aspects of living here.
But, most importantly it’s to encourage conversation wherever that may be - I fully expect most conversations related to Rwanda to happen offsite, off kigaliwire.com. Conversations are already happening on flickr, twitter, ipernity, 23hq, radar and on the blog - this is just the start. Although realistically, I’m not sure if one person can really manage all of this - possibly for Rwanda it’s OK, but any topic with a high level of interest in a place with 80% internet penetration then you’d be swamped - not so in rwanda, at least not yet.
Whatever you do, don’t copy and paste the old way of doing things onto the web - it doesn’t work.
Lastly, the Internet evolves rapidly - Twitter is the hip kid now, but in 6 months? 1 year? 2 years? It’s very important to keep up to date with changes and new tools and to try them out for usefulness.
For the moment twitter, rss and delicious do all the heavy loading for me. I spent almost no time looking for new tools. I just keep an eye on some folk who do this a lot of the time, sometimes for a living.
I monitor what number of mediawonks, journalism professors and media obsessives are bookmarking and tweeting and filter a lot of info they find through Yahoo Pipes
the result is a manageable newswire of (hopefull) all the important info I need to be aware of in the development of journalism and online tools in one manageable rss feed
This is just the start - I hope to integrate kigaliwire into SMS, get a couple of young Rwandan journalists onboard, get accreditation and do some original reporting myself, develop it across other services. I’m already looking at incorporating some mapping services for the election in August 2010. A lot more to come hopefully.
online distribution & collaboration
graham holliday || kigaliwire.com
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
The old way...
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
The “old way” of publishing and distributing news is old fashioned, cumbersome, expensive,
a bit broken and, in the print world at least, it’s always late.
Journalism - Los Angeles
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Doing journalism is expensive
Editing & Production - Washington D.C.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Printing - Delhi
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Distribution - New York City
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Sales - Kigali
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Today we’re going to focus on distribution and how this works online
$644 million per year
Business Insider Jan 2009
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
because the old way is unsustainable. It reportedly costs the New York Times $644 million
per year to distribute the print edition -
The new way...
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Mainstream media have been working on the new way for quite some time. For at least 28
years...
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
And they still can’t make it pay. See video from 1981- youtube.com/watch?v=5WCTn4FljUQ
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
All the tools I use to distribute news about Rwanda are all online and (currently) free.
keywords || tags || links || #hashtags
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
The main drivers across all the tools I use are; keywords, tags, links and hashtags on Twitter
and similar tools.
Alan Rusbridger, Guardian Editor
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
In this short video, Alan Rusbridger, Guardian editor, explains why Twitter is useful for
journalists; for collaboration and distribution of news
Step 1 - Check your presence
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
namechk.com
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
make sure you can occupy the internet with your unique name - you don’t want a name
that’s already been nabbed.
Step 2
transparent
Step 2 - Be transparent
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Blog the back story
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
It is a little time consuming, but if you tell people how you are working and why, you might
learn of better ways to do things - and on the internet it is good to be straight up.
Publish your roughbook
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Even old notes and scrawls can have value
The Rwanda context
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
A little on my situation in Rwanda and how the processes I’m going to describe are purely
experimental and quite possibly not best suited to a developing country in East Africa... But
I’m looking at this working 3 years down the line, not how things stand today.
Press freedom:
157th out of 175 countries
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
As listed in the Reporters without borders 2009 Press freedom index
Foreign press accreditation:
$1,000 per year
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
I don’t have press accreditation - not at this price - the fee is reportedly coming down very
soon to a far more manageable $100 per year. As such, kigaliwire is pretty much a photoblog
come news aggregator at the moment - original reporting will have to wait a little.
Broadband:
4 hours to download a 45mb file
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
We keep hearing about the arrival of super-fast broadband in Rwanda - but it’s not here yet -
this is the cable that connects me to the world. It’s just outside my front door in Kigali. It
costs $133 per month to have medium speed internet from Rwandatel at home. Speed varies
greatly throughout the day; from pretty quick, to a complete stop.
10 tools for
online distribution
& collaboration
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
1. publish2.com
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Publish2 is a social bookmarking site specifically for journalists with a number of useful
collaborative tools and a tip box feature
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
find a news story
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Click the bookmarklet and editorialise the info bearing in mind where the link is heading -
publish2, delicious, twitter, your new website - you have to keep in mind the end destination.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
When you save the bookmark, it will appear on the Publish2 website - I have a small network
here mostly consisting of foreign correspondents, foreign desk editors and those interested
in African news.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
The link also appears on Twitter which is by far the most highly engaged community I have
discovered online interested in discussing and sharing information about Rwanda.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
The link also appears on the excellent social bookmarking site - delicious.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
The RSS feed from my account on delicious then feeds into the kigaliwire.com website in the
breaking news column.
publish2 || twitter || delicious || kigaliwire
1 - 350+ people
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
With publish2 I can quickly distribute information across these four sites each of which
currently have networks of between 1 and 350+ people
2. pixelpipe.com
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Pixelpipe helps you wire up 100 or more online services. I use it to distribute photos, tweets,
links, blog posts and audio. Sign up and add all the social media services you use - I spent 3
months or more slowly adding new services for kigaliwire. I now have around 80 different
accounts.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Take a photo - this is my taxi in Kigali
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
photo + link to 45 sites
And upload from the pixelpipe website
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
The photo immediately appears on all the photo sharing sites I have wired up - such as 23HQ
pictured above.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
And ipernity
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Flickr
10 - 200+ contacts on 45 sites
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
On each photo sharing site I am trying to build small communities of folk interested in
Rwanda and East/Central Africa and also just those interested in photography.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Pixelpipe also works from my mobile phone - there is an iPhone app which will work on a
data network and/or wifi - throw in a couple of editing applications - camerabag for one -
and I can publish across up to 100 sites while I’m on the move.
3. hellotxt.com
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Hellotxt is similar to pixelpipe but allows me to send updates and photos and other media to
yet more sites. I use pixelpipe to send updates to hellotxt which in turn sends them on to a
bunch of other sites
4. tubemogul.com
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
A video distribution tool - like pixelpipe but focussed solely on video
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Watch this short video to see how it works.
5. bit.ly
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Bit.ly is a url shortener with useful statistical analysis. Short urls are important for services
like twitter where space is at a premium.
6. RSS + Yahoo Pipes + Feedburner
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Raw RSS feeds from a number of news sites and filtered feeds sent through Yahoo Pipes are
the main online information sources I use for kigaliwire. Feedburner allows me to make RSS
feeds easily available and people can subscribe to the website via email using feedburner. It
also allows me to open up the information on the website for others to build things with -
not something I’m looking at doing, but it make the site yet more “porous”
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Yahoo Pipes is a fantastic tool for gathering, filtering and sorting huge amounts of
information - the only downside is it’s a wee bit flakey, slower than straight RSS and needs a
little bit of a learning curve to figure out how to set it up - it does, on the other hand, greatly
improve your understanding of how RSS works and how data flows across the Internet.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
In fact, Kigaliwire grew out of a Yahoo Pipe experiment I was playing with in which I filtered
news for different countries/topics and sent the resulting feed unedited into twitter as a
“world news wire” service using a service called twitterfeed
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
the idea was/is whenever a country or issue “kicks off” I would turn off the auto twitterfeed
updates which are ugly, slow and not 100% reliable...
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
And go human....
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
If there is a breaking news event in Haiti I could theoretically turn the twitterfeed tap off and
update things manually in a more web-twitter friendly manner.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
During the Iran troubles, Iranwire was getting retweeted a lot, but there was no human doing
anything - it’s just an custom built newsfeed coming out of Yahoo Pipes. A human could add
so much more value - that’s what I hope @kigaliwire is doing for those interested in Rwanda.
7. Specialist search engines
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
I am starting to send my updates and blog posts through Afrigator - an African blog search
engine and aggregator - more likely to get kigaliwire discovered if I let it swim in a pool
where people are looking for Africa focussed information. Afrigator also has a twitter like
service called gatorpeeps - I send all twitter updates to gatorpeeps too.
8. tweetdeck.com
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
More a monitoring tool than a distribution tool - I use tweetdeck and/or tweetgrid to monitor
twitter for talk about rwanda using live keyword searches
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
You could call it a “social newswire”. It sometimes works like an early warning station or just
points you to information that you might not have come across using other monitoring
methods.
9. pingomatic.com
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Pingomatic allows me to tell a wide variety of blog search engines whenever I update
kigaliwire.
10. netvibes.com
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
I use Netvibes to aid in the transparency practice - I try to send all raw feeds of information I
have coming to my desktop into a publicly available version on netvibes. You can do similar
with igoogle and google reader, but netvibes is a very flexible alternative. Because it’s web-
based, it also allows me to work whenever I’m away from my desktop or working from my
mobile.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
But you can never rely on any of these online services to work all the time - they are online
and they are free - so what do you expect?
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Now, I fully realise this is a hell of a scattergun approach, but as I mentioned at the beginning
this isn’t about how things stand at the moment - this is about 3 yrs down the line.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Throwing all this information about Rwanda into a tonne of different “rooms” on the Internet
may, in 60-80 per cent of cases - be futile. Even though I’ve only just started on this, I can
already see sites like Plerb, Kwippy and Jaiku are pretty useless for talking about and
disseminating information about Rwanda - but I can add new services as they come along
and drop those that don’t work as and when
Foster debate
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
One of the key tasks is to try and foster debate on those sites where people are discussing
Rwanda
Entertain??
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Find the “rooms” where you can entertain folk - discuss Rwanda in a more lighthearted way,
discuss the quirkier aspects of living here.
Encourage the conversation... Unlike...
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
But, most importantly it’s to encourage conversation wherever that may be - I fully expect
most conversations related to Rwanda to happen offsite, off kigaliwire.com. Conversations
are already happening on flickr, twitter, ipernity, 23hq, radar and on the blog - this is just the
start. Although realistically, I’m not sure if one person can really manage all of this. Possibly
for a place like Rwanda it might be OK - but any topic with a high level of interest in a
country with high levels of internet penetration then you might potentially be swamped - not
so in Rwanda, at least not yet.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Whatever you do, don’t copy and paste the old way of doing things onto the web - it doesn’t
work as you can see in this short video...
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Lastly, the Internet evolves rapidly - Twitter is the hip kid now, but in 6 months? 1 year? 2
years? It’s very important to keep up to date with changes and new tools and to try them out
for usefulness.
twitter || RSS || delicious
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
For the moment twitter, RSS and delicious do all the heavy lifting for me. I spent almost no
time looking for new tools. I just keep an eye on some folk who do this a lot of the time,
sometimes for a living.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
I “auto-monitor” what a number of mediawonks, journalism professors and media obsessives
are bookmarking and tweeting by filtering a lot of the info they find through Yahoo Pipes -
this saves me HUGE amounts of research time. Thanks guys....
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
The result is a manageable newswire of (hopefully) all the important info I need to be aware
of in the development of journalism and online tools in one manageable RSS feed
kigaliwire.com || kigalibackwire.tumblr.com
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
This is just the start - I hope to integrate kigaliwire into SMS, get a couple of young Rwandan
journalists onboard, get accreditation and do some original reporting myself, develop it
across other services. I’m already looking at incorporating some mapping services for the
election in August 2010. A lot more to come hopefully.
image and video credits
Me:
Walking around Nyamirambo looking for the football room - kigaliwire - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kigaliwire/4032316663/
At the newsagent. 500 Rwf for the daily rag - kigaliwire - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kigaliwire/4025572221/
Selling flour and other goods in USAID bags on Kigali market - kigaliwire - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kigaliwire/3881681987/
Heading home - kigaliwire - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kigaliwire/4017073730/
My taxi in Kigali earlier today - kigaliwire - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kigaliwire/4080553128/
The Rwandatel ADSL wires - kigaliwire - http://www.flickr.com/photos/kigaliwire/3952170399/
Pixelpipe on iPhone - noodlepie - http://www.flickr.com/photos/noodlepie/4094385547/
Everyone else:
Saturday afternoon NYT Sunday section delivery - picturing it - http://www.flickr.com/photos/picturing_it/2573472909/
NBC News Reporters - Shavar Ross - http://www.flickr.com/photos/shavar/27675241/
Washington Post Newsroom - Burnt Pixel - http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithwj/130596384/
Printing Press in Chandni Chowk - dixie_law - http://www.flickr.com/photos/dixielaw/3351665779/
NYC #70 - digital_freak - http://www.flickr.com/photos/digital_freak/183723501/
[The New York Times] - paalia - http://www.flickr.com/photos/paalia/3596228512/
Brick phone - http://www.retrobrick.com/moto8000.html
1981 primitive Internet report on KRON - earthweek - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WCTn4FljUQ
free - TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ - http://www.flickr.com/photos/gi/121409547/
Alan Rusbridger on the Future of Journalism from Carta on Vimeo
vacant sign - renaissancechambara - http://www.flickr.com/photos/renaissancechambara/3542465749/
Hello world! - grytr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/grytr/298119908/
Everywhere but here - scissorhands - http://www.flickr.com/photos/scissorhands33/3430164569/
Tubemogul promo video - tubemogul.com
Yahoo Pipes - Daniele Muscetta - http://www.flickr.com/photos/dani3l3/504501322/
Working. - ianmunroe - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ian_munroe/3830078377/
Slums in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil - World Resources - http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldresourcesinstitute/2550699761/
Apple Valley Tin House - NikZane - http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikzane/3176895180/
Tibet: The monk Debate - silverlinedwinnebago - http://www.flickr.com/photos/silverlinedwinnebago/1424137472/
Day Seventy Five - Dustin Diaz - http://www.flickr.com/photos/polvero/3362547124/
Discussion - svennwerk - http://www.flickr.com/photos/svenwerk/858381180/
BBC Comedy video
Changed prioroties ahead - ➨ Redvers - http://www.flickr.com/photos/redvers/532076662/
Heavy lifting - turbotoddi - http://www.flickr.com/photos/turbotoddi/3892716969/
kigaliwire.com || kigalibackwire.tumblr.com
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
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