Syndication and Campaigning
In 2006, syndication (i.e. rss, atom, rdf) became more common and whole new web sites and services were built around it. Some organisations also started using is as part of their mix of advocacy with mixed success.
This topic could be (depends on you) a sharing of successful and unsuccessful approaches to syndication, including syndicating content, syndicating actions, aggregating content, aggregating actions and other approaches organisations have taken or be thinking of. It could also explore the impact of syndication and what benefits and down-sides they provide for a campaign.
Are you interested in participating in this group? Then add your name, comments and/or further edit the page with your thoughts, experience and questions to ensure it stays on the agenda.
Interested Participants
Format: name, organisation and why this topic?
Jamie Woolley, Greenpeace UK - syndication can add real texture to a site, bringing in influences from other sources, and like Brian (see below) I'm interested in getting more people using it, or is there a natural adoption ceiling that we'll struggle to break? And I'd love to talk about Yahoo Pipes - i've only just glanced at it but it looks amazing. How can we use it?
Participant Input
Add directly here or via the comments box below.
RSS subscriptions and Reflecting Buzz --brianfit, Wed, 02 May 2007 04:29:11 -0500 reply
I work with Greenpeace International, and I find signup rates for our RSS feeds frustratingly low, and would love to hear from anyone who has had real success in marketing RSS subscriptions. We use Feedburner, love the reporting.
On the flip side in terms of successes, we've gotten high praise for a page I'm calling a "Buzz reflector" which we built on the Green my Apple (ahem, Webby Award Winning Green my Apple Site I can say now ;-) ) which pulls UGC and mentions of the campaign from Flickr, Technorati and Del.icio.us. http://www.greenmyapple.org/buzz This provides a nice way to give people that "You're not alone" assurance which can be so necessary to getting them to cross the line into participation. (As a canvasser, I was always taught to never, ever present a reticent person with a blank petition -- make sure it is seeded with the names of their neighbors: same phenom.)
and rss can seed mashups... --Dan McQuillan?, Tue, 08 May 2007 15:00:58 -0500 reply
rss is great for making a richer site, but i think it's also a good way to expose data for mashups (by your own org or by others)
my guess us that putting geo tags inside as much of the rss as possible will be good for organisations like amnesty & greenpeace, as the number of tools for slicing and visualising geographical data grows
i'd like to promote the idea of something like backstage.bbc.co.uk for NGOs? (it'd be nice to turn something like http://hackday.org/ back on yahoo for it's dodgy record in china :)
