Contribute to the combined ICT4D news feed

05.03.2008 | Christian Kreutz

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.

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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.

pipes.webpPlease 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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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