A (Yahoo) Pipe Dream for Social Media Citizen Journalists
April 22nd, 2008 | by Brad King |Robin Hamman over at the BBC kludged together a very cool Yahoo Pipes tool which — much like Twitter TV — allows people to see content tagged by areas on a Yahoo Map.
The UGC Finder, as it’s dubbed, works like this, according to Hamman:
I’ve set up keyword searches for:
- Explosion
- Evacuation
- Bomb
On the following services:
- Tweetscan (search of public tweets on twitter)
- Flickr (photosharing)
- Youtube (video)
- Technorati (blog search)
- Icerocket (blog search)
In other words, it’s a real-time, interactive map of what is going down in the old social media sphere. This is cool because it looks at stories in a different way — and journalism in a different way.
Which is good.
When I was in Pittsburgh with Cynthia, I kept harping on the idea that we need to stop templating what doesn’t work in traditional media on to modern media. We can’t take traditions and continue them on simply because that’s the way it’s always been done.
We need to embrace the idea that interactive media allows for everyone’s voice to be heard. We need to create tools that encourage that. Filters that allow us to find relevant content. Displays that encourage individualized site and information design.
We live in a one size fits one world. (I like that. I call COIN.)
The idea behind Hamman’s Pipe is brilliant because it does just that. It allows a news organization to both add its own voice to the mix, encourage others to contribute across a variety of social media applications and enables those with the know-how to mash-up the information in new ways.
Big props to Hamman.
