One great way for information hunting feeds, is to grasp whatever is out there on the web concerning one topic. This way, you can get news, discussions and great links right on your desktop. But what about filtering them in order to get the best out of the mass? Especially, in the Information and communication technology field (ICT4D), I find there is lack of combined effort to share information. I know of many people working in the ICT4D, who directly or indirectly share links and news, so I thought, why don’t we combine the efforts into one feed. There are many exceptions such as Ismael Peña-López, whose resources and blog posts are greatly helpful.
Therefore, I would like to initiate, together with you, a common effort to get an ultimate ICT4D feed, which combines all interesting ICT4D resources. There are amazing tools (e.g. yahoo pipes, dapper, aiderss) out there to make the search for information so much easier, as well as great people writing free tutorials about it. The open and jointly collection of feeds could be the first step to build a ICT4D news ticker. The second step could be to filter the feed, so it brings the most interesting stories (e.g. most discussed) or links out.
I make a start here offering my OPML file, which is a list of 40 feeds, which can be imported in any feedreader. Marshall Kirkpatrick has a nice post on how (and why) to create an OPML file.
You can also subscribe directly to the main feed that contains a lot of resources (40 feeds), and which is a combination of my ICT4D feeds. It already erases duplications.
Please let me know if you have any suggestions to filter the feed or want to work on it with me in yahoo pipes. I will further develop the feed in the next weeks and report about the progress. Please contribute to the feed by either sending links or commenting on interesting websites or feeds. You can also tag your links in Delicious or Technorati ICT4D and it will be automatically included. I will always update the opml file (all available feeds).
Thank you very much in advance!
First learning experiences:
- To filter better ICT4D related content it would be helpful to have a list of key words for ICT4D such as “digital divide”. Do you know of any other words? If so, please comment or send them to me.
- For example apc.org has no RSS, but with dapper.net, I could build a feed.
UPDATE (03/11/2008)
- There are currently ten subscribers to the feed. Thanks!
- Thanks to Ella Roman I got some more interesting feeds.
- It seems that the feed is growing by size and entries, so I try to filter not relevant stuff out. For example the key word “digital divide” also shows entries from European cases. But is this interesting in the ICT4Dfeed?
- One way to filter is to subscribe only to a category of a blog. For example next billion for example has the category “Telecommunications and IT or Ethan Zuckerman has one on ICT4D.
- I added the respective source where the link is from e.g. Delicious, blog search, blog posts, ICT4D organization, media and ICT4D community.
ICT4Dfeed
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started an initiative to build a common ict4d feed. Please contribute with feeds or help to develop the filter. http://tinyurl.com/25lole
started an initiative to build a common ict4d feed. Please contribute with feeds or help to develop the filter. http://tinyurl.com/25lole
Sweet! Check out what Beth Kanter does at NetSquared with the NPTech feed, too, a highlight selection. Your feed through AideRSS would have some up sides and some downsides, but awesome to think about. Good luck!
Great initiative
This blog post might help?
http://gobigalways.com/my-secret-is-a-dashboard-for-each-side-of-the-firewall/
Anyway, I’m not comfortable enough with all this to help you more, but I’ll be watching your results! ;o)
First of all, thanks for the compliments
I agree with Marshall that the work done with the NPTech tag/feed was/is great.
And, actually, the work done with the web2fordev tag/feed (and you deserve some credit about it, don’t you?) was great too.
I guess the point, as you focus, is more on having “good” tags than trying to gather all possible feeds.
Talking about tags, difficult question. The ones I use:
- ict4d
- ict4sd (s is for sustainable)
- digital divide, digitaldivide, digital_divide
- e-readiness
- web2fordev
@Marshall yes I know nptech and contribute to it too.
I think collaboratively tagging and sharing bookmarks is key. However I know only of nptech that works so well and it does not work for the ict4d because there is no community. That’s why I came up with this feed.
@Xavier great link and exactly the direction I am heading for.
@Ismael thanks for the key words and the compliments. I added them.
Hey,
I love the idea, and have put my OPML file up on my blog – http://www.designedforafrica.org
I think the development of a combined feed would be great, I hope it works!
Ella
Hey! I LOVE the fix you made with the ICT4Dfeed, categorizing it (delicious, blog search, ICT4D organization, etc.).
That was CLEVER!!
Just subscribed to your feed. Thanks! Great initiative!
Do i have to do anything so my ICT4D and “digital divide” tag on Delishus appear in your blog?
Although i am occasionally blogging on the subject, i don’t think that my blog is ICT4D only, but you are welcome to check it out and decide.
Anyhow, great initiative!
BTW, just thought about it. You might want to add tags such as “one laptop per child” “OLPC” or “$100 laptop” to your feed as they all are concerned with the MIT project falling in the category of ICT4D. Alternatively you may also want consider “classmate” or “classmate PC”, which is Intel’s alternative to OLPC.
@Dima thanks for your comment. Yes your bookmarks are included as long as you tag them ICT4D or digital-divide. Recently I tried to focus the feed a bit more because it had sometimes over 50 resources a day. Therefore I left out media resources, which are anyway password protected. I am not sure what subscriber expect. A small feed with most interesting articles or everyhting happens on the web around ICT4D? I will write an update post soon and ask all subscriber and might offer then two different ones. Quit tricky because I do not want to filter too much myself.
@hrheingold my pipe aggregation for ICT4D: http://tinyurl.com/25lole This is a good start to combine tools: http://tinyurl.com/2w8ed6
dlcsubs Contribute to the combined ICT4D news feed : crisscrossed blog http://bit.ly/SC8F2