Screenshot of the Public Media H1N1 Widget
Fluportal.org is one of a growing number of projects promoting collaboration and cooperation within the public media system. As the project wraps up, I wanted to highlight our Public Media H1N1 widget and what it can offer to future collaborations and crisis response efforts.
From the beginning, we wanted to find a way to catalog and display H1N1 coverage from across public media. By showing the breadth and diversity of public media coverage, we hoped to demonstrate the reach and value of the system. We not only wanted to post this content on FluPortal.org, but we felt stations would be interested in supplementing their own local coverage.
We were surprised to find that there was no way for us to get a detailed picture of news coverage and other programming from public media stations across the system. Our first solution was to use Delicious.com to hack together an RSS feed of public media coverage. While this system worked, it was dependent on our team manually searching, saving, and tagging H1N1 coverage. A more robust and automated solution needed to be built.
In partnership with NPR, we set out to create a platform for aggregating and syndicating public media content related to H1N1. The result is our Public Media H1N1 widget — a highly flexible tool that can be redeployed in future public media collaborations focused on a particular issue or crisis.
Working with NPR project manager Javaun Moradi (whose vision and hard work was invaluable to this project), we identified the scope and necessary functionality and decided to use Daylife, a provider of news aggregation services. Daylife’s technology crawls RSS and ATOM news feeds and identifies the major themes in all stories it finds. Daylife enabled us to quickly create an automated content feed for the H1N1 and filter by media source, in this case a list of over 40 public media stations and programs actively publishing coverage of the pandemic. (Note that Daylife can only scrape content from text-based RSS or Atom feeds, excluding audio-only sources and stations that do not offer feeds.)
By using the Daylife platform, we were able to create something quickly without expending a lot of developer resources. The stories collected by Daylife are delivered as a highly configurable Javascript widget and RSS feed available for stations to use on their websites. (Read more about it on Daylife’s blog.)
Public media is in need of more shared technology resources, and what we have built with the Public Media H1N1 widget will scale well and is available for use in future public media projects. With such a reusable infrastructure in place, our industry can respond very quickly to crises and create and syndicate automated feeds of public media coverage. We hope our work here will prove valuable for others and serve as a model for future development of shared tools and resources.
