Consulting services for companies wanting to engage with online communities through social media.Focused on online communities, open technologies, open source, web 2.0, social media, RSS, blogging, and podcasting.
While many people use Yahoo Pipes to filter RSS feeds, Pipes can also be used to modify RSS feeds to work better for your purposes. In this example, we will add the author name to the beginning of the title to make it easier to see the author without opening the item in your rss reader. I recommend watching the Introduction to Yahoo Pipes: 2 minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo if you haven’t already, since we’re going use the basic pipe developed in that demo using fetch feed and sort modules, but without the filter module.
You can watch the embedded video above, but I recommend downloading the higher resolution Quicktime file (19 MB) or clicking the full screen toggle icon in the player to watch. The quality will be much better than the flash version embedded above.
Fetch Feed. Fetches the elements from 2 feeds: ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM.
Sort Module. Sort by date in descending order to make sure things are sorted in a logical manner.
Loop module with String Builder Module. Loops through each element in the feed and builds a string with item.author: item.title. This string is assigned back into item.title.
Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe.
I’ve decided to resurrect the Portland Data Plumbing Group to give us a time and place to talk about RSS feed hacking, Yahoo Pipes, Dapper, and other related technologies.
We’ll be having these meetings on the 2nd Tuesday of every month at 6pm (location TBD). The first meeting will be on:
Tuesday, January 13th
6:00pm - 7:30pm
Location TBD
Please RSVP on Upcoming if you plan to attend.
The agenda for the first meeting:
Intros
Round table discussion: each person gets 3-5 min to talk about the coolest thing they’ve done to manipulate an RSS feed.
Talk about ideas for future agendas.
If you want to be notified of future meetings, you should subscribe to the Portland Data Plumbing Google Group. A huge thanks to Justin for starting this group and for encouraging me to schedule a new meeting!
Most of you know that I have been blogging on a few different blogs, so I thought it would be good to do a weekly summary with links to my posts appearing on other blogs.
In a recent Wired News Article, 6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now, Michael Calore talks about several web technologies that are already important for social media and online communities, but will continue to be increasingly important in 2009.
Identity Management. With all of the buzz behind OpenID, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect in 2008, will we finally be able to better integrate our profile data, friend lists, and other identity data to be able to better manage our information in 2009? While the big social networks have already been looking at ways to implement these technologies, smaller and niche social networks and communities (including corporate communties) will need to start thinking about them in 2009. How will you make it easier for your members to join a community while bringing any appropriate identity information along with them?
Lifestreaming. Most of us have accounts on dozens of different sites, so services like FriendFeed have been popping up to help pull our updates and those of our friends into a single stream where they can be more easily consumed. Does your niche social network or corporate community have an rss feed of each member’s activity and have you encouraged them to add this feed to their FriendFeed account?
Location Awareness. I spend quite a bit of time thinking about interesting ways to use location information as a part of my work with Shizzow. For me, location awareness is all about merging our online identities with real world interactions with real people. While it might be interesting to know that a friend of mine is visiting some exotic far away city, I am more interested in being able to find friends right now to get together for coworking, tea, or a couple of drinks at happy hour. How can you use location information to help your community members get together in the real world for meetups?
I hope this provides a little food for thought as you think about your social media and online community plans for 2009.
The most common search results included: dawn foster, best community software, mozy restore, facebook for companies, community manager, shizzow, fast wonder, mozy sucks, and blogging tips.
I also enjoying going to the end of the list to find search results that brought a single person to my blog. Here are a few of the most amusing / interesting:
beer consultanting
breakfast places near san francisco bridge where king of jordan ate
bubble tea facility
clarinet atari
death of myspace
what is going on with all the social networking sites like wikis,blogs and twitter
man + woman + online communitties
handy tips + how to change a fluorescent kitchen unit bulb
green dragon dawn foster
facebook rss stalk
community manager career — why?
“highly illogical” spock
bill gates quote faster
OK, enough silliness for today. I hope all of you have a happy new year!
Ignite Portland was featured in the Oregonian resulting in mayhem, overcrowding, and a new LoT policy of no mainstream media coverage prior to events like Ignite and BarCampPortland.
I took my mom on a vacation to Maui where we spent time lounging on the beach and drinking fruity drinks out of pineapples.
I joined Portland-based startup, Shizzow, to manage the Shizzow community (as a side project, since we are currently bootstrapping). We were also honored to be guests on the Strange Love Live podcast.
Continue to help organize more awesome events in Portland.
Finish my eBook about Companies and Online Communities.
Learn more about Yahoo Pipes.
Continue mission #GetOffButt to get healthier, stronger, and in better shape.
Again, I want to do something spectacular enough that it prompts someone to write a Wikipedia article for me.
Another thing I’m excited about for 2009
The Portland tech community. I rave about it almost constantly, but I do expect the Portland tech community to continue to produce exciting new companies, projects, and community organized events to become even stronger in 2009.
This video shows how to get input from a list of items in a CSV file, and it introduces the loop module. A CSV file is a great choice when you want to fetch a bunch of feeds and change them frequently without having to update your pipe. If you haven’t already watched the 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Introductory Demo, I strongly suggest that you watch it. This demo builds on the basic structure developed in the introductory demo. The CSV file I’m using also contains the same feeds from ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM that we used in the original demo plus a few others.
You can watch the embedded video above, but I recommend downloading the higher resolution Quicktime file (22 MB) to watch. The quality will be much better than the flash version above.
Fetch CSV Module. Enter the URL of the CSV file (make sure that it already exists in a publicly accessible location) along with information about column names and separation characters as needed.
Loop module with Fetch Feed. Loops through each element in the CSV file and fetches the feed associated with the item.
Filter Module. Filter by a couple of keywords.
Sort Module. Sort by date in descending order to make sure things are sorted in a logical manner.
Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe.
I wanted to have a way to find all of the comments posted on any of my WebWorkerDaily posts, but I couldn’t find an easy way to do it in Wordpress (I don’t have access to plugins, since it isn’t my blog). As always, I turned to Yahoo Pipes for the solution, and I made it customizable so that others could use my pipe. Since I wrote this pipe for my use, it supports the configuration I needed, and I also tested it on TechCrunch, Mashable, and GigaOM. However, there were quite a few multi-user blogs where it does not work, so please pay close attention to the caveats below before using my new Comments for One Author on Multi-Author Wordpress Blog pipe.
Caveats:
Works only with Wordpress Blogs
Works only with blogs using Feedburner
Will not work under non-standard URL / feed formats
I suspect that the Wordpress / Feedburner combo is probably the most common configuration for multi-user blogs, so it should work for many blogs. However, if you aren’t using the configuration supported by this pipe, you should be able to clone the pipe and tweak it pretty easily to use other formats.
Consulting services focused on helping your company get real business value out of participating in online communities and social media.
Interests include online communities, open technologies, open source, web 2.0, social media, RSS, Yahoo Pipes, blogging, podcasting, and innovation.
The opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone.
About Dawn
Contact Info & vCard: Dawn Foster Consultant, Community Manager, Event Organizer, Blogger, Podcaster, Vegan, and Technology Enthusiast Fast Wonder LLC dawn@fastwonder.com cell: 503-702-7223
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