Hi Madeline,
Thanks for the props and the inquiries on MNspeak's Aggregator (http://www.mnspeak.com/mnspeak/aggregator/). Here are some answers: > Who knew all this was out here? We haven't even had our two-month anniversary yet, but the audience is growing pretty rapidly. If you're interested in hearing more about the site, here's an audio interview that Mary Lucia did with me on 89.3 The Current back in May: http://www.mnspeak.com/mp3/mnspeak-rex-mpr-current.mp3 One of my partners on the site, Chuck Olsen, launched a related website just yesterday called MNstories (read more about it here: http://www.mnspeak.com/mnspeak/archive/post-430.cfm). Whereas MNspeak is about news and events and feedback, MNstories is about the untold narratives in our community. We have plans to launch more sites in this local network in the coming year. The general philosophy is to design websites and social software that allow people to communicate with others in their community -- and to do it in a way that isn't bland. > Like to have a way to select, or organize and search mnspeak to get > certain sites but not others. You might notice that I have sources broken down into categories at the top of the page, so that you can choose to not see, say, Sports or Technology sources by unchecking the boxes. This makes it a little easier to consume all this data. I'm still pondering if this is the best interface for this -- it will likely evolve into something more personalizable. And you're right about search... > it would be interesting to see... > news aggregated from Minneapolis neighborhood websites > (if they were all updated) neighborhood newspapers, organizations, > businesses, the City of Minneapolis, KFAI, Minneapolis cable TV, > arts orgs, e-democracy, neighborhood discussion lists, and of > course the election Wiki, etc. I absolutely agree. A couple local media organizations (including sources I greatly respect, such as SW Journal and Minneapolis Observer) don't have RSS feeds, which is unfortunate. I can't aggregate 150 sources by hand, so I need those feeds! However, MNspeak itself is a blog that's all about local news/events/culture, so you'll occasionally see us post items from those publications on the front page: http://www.mnspeak.com/ For this listserv, I should give a caveat on the tone of the blog. All of our contributors -- about a dozen of us -- are young people who care deeply about what's going on in our communities, but we also care about having fun things to talk about at the club at night. So it's a mix of news and entertainment, delivered in a voice similar to the Daily Show. > Like to know more about how mnspeak was created. Does the site > consist of pre-existing sites Rex found...this is quite an achievement > or were the sites created for mnspeak using...what...blogging > software to present a certain uniformity of appearance? My day job is running a network of websites at a large internet media company, and I've been involved with online news for a decade. So the Aggregator is a custom application that I wrote -- it took around 40 hours to build, and it still needs some work. Technically speaking, all blogging software suites create XML files (RSS or Atom or something) -- the aggregator merely ingests those and presents it all in a somewhat-pretty way. If you need more info on the mechanics, I'm happy to answer any other questions about it. Sorry for the long-winded response. I want to also thank several people on this list have replied to my initial post with news sources that have already made the Aggregator's sources grow quite a bit. Thanks for your curiosity about the site, -Rex Sorgatz ______________ MNspeak.com Fimoculous.com Ibsys.com NBColympics.com REMINDERS: 1. Be civil! Please read the NEW RULES at http://www.e-democracy.org/rules. If you think a member is in violation, contact the list manager at [EMAIL PROTECTED] before continuing it on the list. 2. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. For state and national discussions see: http://e-democracy.org/discuss.html For external forums, see: http://e-democracy.org/mninteract ________________________________ Minneapolis Issues Forum - A Civil City-focused Civic Discussion - Mn E-Democracy Post messages to: mailto:[email protected] Subscribe, Un-subscribe, etc. at: http://e-democracy.org/mpls
