UGC Finder: Piping Hot News into your Wurld

My friend Robin Hamman (Cybersoc) has just released a tool for tracking down news based on key words.
Its called UGC Finder.

"I've dubbed it UGC Finder - for journalists that uses Yahoo Pipes to aggregate and filter the results of keyword searches for tagged content and conversations in social networks and media sharing sites." Robin Hamman

"The UGC finder will track much more than Technorati blogs - it will track
* Tweetscan (search of public tweets on twitter)
* Flickr (photosharing)
* Youtube (video)
* Technorati (blog search)
* Icerocket (blog search)"

This could be really helpful. Basically, I have been reading the blogosphere through key word searches for the past 2-3 years. Rather than reading the same blogs or authors, I have been doing a key word search on technorati, creating a watchlist, and then dropping the RSS feed from that watch into my news reader. Everyday I track the words the whoever is using them. Which is ok, and its gets me to the site within ten minutes of when that word is posted, but my results have been limited to whatever ends up in the Technorati basket. All that is about to change. I think. If Robin's dastardly invention proves successful.

BY JOVE, my dear Cybersoc, you have solved the mystery! The answer was in the PIPES all along!

Trivia. Last week I was in Australia, doing some online research on the rhizomic structure of the internet and the article i was reading on rhizomes was from the Cybersoc himself. Small world.

Technorati Tags: cybersoc, robin hamman, ugc finder

Comments

[Robin Hamman]

Hi Andrew, thanks for the link. There is, of course, the little problem of the thing I made in pipes not fully working but it's getting there, certainly a step in the right direction. If you've got any geeky readers I could use some help with the next few steps.

re: the Rhizome's paper... the theory kind of falls over at the bottleneck/monopoly point of the domain name servers. You could pretty severely disable the internet pretty easily if you managed to knock those out. It would only be temporary, of course, but with the internet so vital and domain names the way we navigate around it, that would be enough to seriously disrupt many people from going about their jobs and personal lives in a normal way. Anyway, I think this means it's not really a rhizome, more a tree with many branches.

Best Wishes,
Robin.

[andrew]

Thanks Robin. Its a great paper for 1996. i would expect a few afterthoughts.

Hope you rope in a few helper-geeks to move your project forward.

You really are the Rhizome Cowboy!