The survey was conducted in late November and early December with 90 people responding to the survey, and more information about the respondents and the survey can be found on the Online Community Report blog. Here’s a summary of the key findings.
Most communities have not been negatively impacted by the economy.
Image from OCRN
For those that have been effected, the hardest areas hit included.
Contractor staffing
Platform budget
Full time staffing
Communities are becoming MORE valuable to management.
When they asked:
Have your internal stakeholders (execs, management) attitudes toward the value of the online community changed because of current economic pressure?
Slightly more than half of the respondents (55%) said that their company internal stakeholder’s attitudes have changed towards the value of the online community because of the current economic pressure. For those whose stakeholder’s attitudes that had changed, over half of the respondents (55%) indicated that their internal stakeholder’s considered their online community more valuable because of the current economic pressures.
The current economic issues are hitting every segment, but it’s nice to know that online communities are faring better than some other areas. This post is just a quick summary of the key points, so I encourage you to read more details on Bill Johnston’s Online Community Report blog.
Yahoo Pipes can make it easier to work with location data (latitude / longitude) across multiple RSS feeds, even when the original feeds have different ways of specifying the location data. In this demo, I’ll show you how to use the Location Extracter module to normalize the data and then filter on lat / long data to get results only within a certain area.
Fetch Feed. In this example, we will use a feed from Shizzow containing information about places and a feed from the USGS with earthquake data. Both store their lat / long data in different ways within the RSS Feed.
Location extractor. This module is atypical, since it takes no parameters and has no user configurable elements. It simply looks for lat / long data and saves what it finds as y:location.lat and y:location.lon.
Sort. Sort by date (descending) to make sure that the output from your various source feeds appears in sorted order.
Filter. We then filter the source feeds to include only the entries located in the western part of the United States (25 < latitude < 50 and -130 < longitude < -115).
Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe.
After learning that Yahoo Pipes introduced a new module called YQL (Yahoo Query Language) last week, I knew that I had to find a way to work it into one of my 2 minute videos. YQL uses an SQL-like syntax for more powerful and flexible inputs into Yahoo Pipes; however, working it into a 2 minute demo was quite challenging, since queries can be complicated. I cheated a little by glossing over the query language and focusing on how to use YQL effectively within Pipes. Honestly, I’m never going to teach someone to use an SQL syntax without extensive training, so this 2 minute demo is really geared toward people with database experience or programming backgrounds. I also did a more complicated version of this pipe with a more extensive explanation that you might be interested in reading to get more details about using YQL within Pipes.
YQL. The query: select * from flickr.photos.info(20) where photo_id in (select id from flickr.photos.search(20) where tags = “igniteportland”). Selects 20 photos from Flickr with the tag “igniteportland”. flickr.photos.search is used to find the images, but it doesn’t provide much information about the images, so I ran it through flickr.photos.info to pull in more data. If you omit the (20), YQL returns 10 results by default, and you can set this number to something appropriate for your needs.
Rename. Maps item.urls.url.content into the more standard item.link, which is recognized by RSS readers and the Yahoo Pipes output for clickable links back to the original content.
Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe.
