Thursday, April 30, 2009

Create Your Own Online Newswire



I have no idea what this is all about, but if you're a journalist or whatever, this might be important. Noodle Pie has the tips on creating an online newswire, something I've always dreamed of doing. When newspapers disappear, we might just need to rely on individual newswires.

Publish2 is social bookmarking service for journalists. The idea is to encourage a kind of link journalism by creating a space for journalists to store links and publish them as a newswire. These maybe links related to a story you're working on, research or clips. I've been using it of late for three very specific tasks;

•publish breaking news on Twitter @frontlineblog
•publish a newswire to the news pages on frontlineclub.com

•publish from my mobile phone
Once you've signed up, installed the wee bookmarklet into your browser toolbar and married your delicious social bookmarking and Twitter accounts to Publish2, the first two tasks on this list are easily doable. I bookmark a story to my account on Publish2, this automatically feeds into the frontlineclub delicious account which in turn automatically appears as the newswire on frontlineclub.com

If I decide a news story requires a tweet, I'll add one at the same time I bookmark the page by scrolling down on the Publish2 bookmarlet and adding the Twitter comment (see above) and using hashtags if appropriate, to help make the tweet more searchable. Publish2 auto-shortens the link using bit.ly which allows you to track the spread of your links.

All of the above works very well, beyond the wee bit of downtime where Publish2 hasn't been working. I could opt to bypass the delicious step and just install the Publish2 widget onto frontlineclub.com but I've been using delicious for so long, I like what it does and it was always the way I wanted to set up the website before playing with Publish2.

The problem arrives when I try to publish from my mobile phone. Publish2 can grab items I choose to share in my Google Reader. What I want to be able to do, and can't, is automatically feed these items from Publish2 into delicious, and then automatically onto frontlineclub.com, and/or send them to Twitter. I also want to be able to edit the description, tags, and tweets too. If Publish2 can solve these last few hiccups, and I see they're working on an iPhone application, I'll be using it exclusively for publishing to the Frontline Club.

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