Digital Media Strategist

According to the NetCraft statistics available at the time of this writing, there are probably about 125 million sites that make up the World Wide Web. This represents an unbelievable amount of information, and the Web certainly isn’t getting any smaller. In an interview last week, Richard Sambrook, Director of Global News for the BBC, addressed one problem inherent in this explosion of the web:

[T]here is now much greater access to information, but also much more of it. And the issue now is, how do you find what you want?

While the goal of many sites is to create more and more content, the web also needs ways to filter that content. Of course, there are many automated systems doing this very well (Google’s search engine is fundamentally a filter), but human-filtered information is still very useful. It is especially useful if the humans doing the filtering are trusted by the users of that information. In fact, Sambrook stated this as something that has always been a primary goal of the news media:

[N]ews organizations have their own sense of what they’re about, and their own filters in terms of what they provide. I think that’s going to become increasingly important. With this huge morass of information available, people are still going to want to know where they can find the stuff that matters to them.

So, in addition to approaching web content from a “What can I add that is worth looking at?” point of view, another equally valid question is “How can I help people find the stuff worth looking at?” More and more big sites are thinking this way, and that’s what I set out to simplify for those of us without a web-development team.

Using the del.icio.us social bookmarking site, it is possible to generate an RSS feed of choice websites and news stories selected by a team of pre-screened contributers. The advantage of this method over a manually-maintained list is that contributers only have to click a single toolbar button to push a story to a feed that is then available for display anywhere — from websites to customers’ feed-readers. This makes it much easier to recruit content-generators (”I just need three seconds of your time a few times a day”), and it also removes any worries associated with giving large numbers of people the ability to edit your website directly.

Here’s how to set things up:

1. Before you can really start, you need to register everyone who is initially going to contribute to the feed for a del.icio.us account. This is free, and it only takes about 30 seconds for each person.
2. Have every contributer add a bookmarklet to the bookmarks toolbar of their browser. This code for the bookmarklet should work in most browsers:
   

   javascript:location.href='http://del.icio.us/USERNAME?url='+escape(location.href)
+'&title='+escape(document.title)+'&tags=YOURTAG'

   Replace USERNAME with the username of the contributer, and YOURTAG with a tag you will use to identify posts for your RSS feed (this doesn’t need to be unique, it just has to be the same for all contributers). When you are done, it should look like this in your bookmarks bar (depending upon what you name it, of course):

   
3. Make up a “dummy” account on del.icio.us. This ultimately will be used to generate the feed, so pick a username that is appropriate (the name I have set up for this site is DigitalMediaStrategist). Don’t use this account for anything else.The dummy account allows you to have multiple contributers all generating the same feed. The only limitation I’ve seen with this method so far comes up when two people tag the same article — and all it does is show up twice.
4. Log into your dummy account and choose subscriptions at the top left of the page under your account name.
   
   Now, click edit in the your subs box on the right,
   
   and enter your selected tag and the username of one of your contributers. Repeat this for as many people as you’d like to have contribute to your feed.
5. Now that you have everyone set up to add to the feed, have them test their setup by visiting an interesting website or news story and clicking their new bookmarklet. When they do, a short page will appear (they may have to log in the first time):
   
   Here, they can edit the page name (in the description box), add their own tags and notes if they like, or just hit save to send the link directly to the feed. If everything looks good after clicking the bookmarklet, all that is necessary to get a post on the feed is a quick click of the save button
6. Assuming everything works as it should, you will find the information from the above form on the subscriptions page of your dummy account. If it’s on that page, it’s on the feed, which can be found at the bottom of that page:
   

There you have it — a human filtered view of the sites you or your organization care about in RSS form. This can be fed to feed readers, Google gadgets, or website plugins like the one running in the sidebar of this page.

Add or remove contributers via the subscriptions in the dummy account, and you have a ready-made system for letting people know “where they can find the stuff that matters to them.”

While I’ve mentioned this setup in a number of conversations, it wasn’t until a recent session of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s weekly blogger/web innovator meeting that I was asked to write it down. I’d like to thank the members of this group for finally getting me to put it out there.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 2:23 am and is filed under User-Generated Content, Enhance Your Website. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.