media monitoring

Does your organization have a Wikipedia entry? Start monitoring it now.

by Rob Cottingham – March 13, 2007 - 12:01am

If your organization is listed in Wikipedia, the community-edited online encyclopedia, congratulations. Quite apart from the virtues of collaborative editing, Wikipedia entries often rank at or near the top of Google search results.

Now break open your RSS aggregator. You're going to want to add a new subscription immediately... because nearly anybody could be editing your entry.

Here's what you do: navigate to your Wikipedia page. (Here's a shot from the entry about Wikipedia itself.)

Wikipedia screenshot

Click on the "history" tab, and you'll be taken to a page detailing every change that anyone has made to this entry, with the most recent at the top.

In other words, it's in the same order as a blog... and like a blog, this page has a news feed. If you're using a modern browser, you'll see an indicator in your address bar (and you can use your browser to subscribe to the feed). If not, just scroll down to the Toolbox on the left-hand side of the page.

Wikipedia toolbox block

The third item in that list offers you your choice of an RSS feed and an Atom feed. Copy the link from whichever one you prefer, and paste it into the aggregator of your choice.

(My setup: I use Firefox 2.0, and I've configured it so that when I click on the XML feed icon in the browser's address bar, it prompts me to subscribe to the feed using Bloglines. I already have a Bloglines folder dedicated to media and blog monitoring, and in it goes.)

Ode to Aggregator2 on WorldChanging

by Alexandra Samuel – April 24, 2006 - 2:31pm

I have a piece on WorldChanging today about using Drupal's Aggregator2 module as a news tracking tool. The piece was partly inspired by a recent inquiry about why to use Aggregator2 rather than Drupal's default: 

Aggregator2 turns the Drupal platform into a powerful tool for news tracking and republishing by offering options for customizing news feeds, tagging news items, and moderating incoming news. That feature set makes Aggregator2 an exceptionally flexible choice for setting up a nonprofit news tracker that aggregates news from a wide range of blogs, news sites and search engines. Because Aggregator2 saves each individual item as an independent node (like a web page) in Drupal, you can edit or annotate news items after you bring them onto your site. Because Aggregator2 lets you assign different tags to different incoming feeds, you can set up different news pages for different topics, and direct news to show up on the appropriate pages. And Aggregator2 is also a terrific tool for integrating content from multiple related web sites or overlapping organizations.

Read the whole story on WorldChanging

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