Something in the pipeline, again.

A colleague is currently testing internet based data- and information collection and distribution channels regarding media development. In order to add more value for future users of his frontend, he wanted to offer some sort of news-ticker. Right away, we thought of using Yahoo Pipes. I had not used the service for quite some time and was wondering, if it withstood the currently hard times for Yahoo-services (e.g. "delicious"). It turned out to be up, running and even more advanced. Yet I tend to use the same set of features as always in order to produce automated news mashups.

I have created three new Pipes:
1. a feed mashup, collecting articles from a list of relevant media development feeds (i.e. UNESCO IPDC, ONI, IWMF, etc.)



2. a site-search mashup, searching relevant media development actors' (i.e. UNESCO, DVID, Worldbank, etc.) websites for search term "media development"



3. a meta mashup, combining Pipes 1 and 2 with other services (i.e. Google News, -Base, -Blogsearch, -Alert, Twitter search, etc.)

Compared with my old Pipes, No 1 and 2 are now far more flexible. I now make use of Google-Spreadsheets containing a list of either rss-feeds or actors' websites, making it possible to add an infinite number of new relevant sources for the mashups. When shared, G-Documents passes the spreadsheet's content as string of comma seperated values (csv), which can then be interpreted by the Pipes, using the 'Loop' and 'Fetch Feed' modules.

I recommend checking public Pipes for similar attempts first: I came up quite quickly with the idea of using spreadsheets, but encountered errors trying to implement it (maybe due to the recently introduced Pipes-Engine 2.0). Finally I made some adjustments to a public 1.0-Pipe by Adrian Short and got it working.

You are welcome to check both Pipes and Spreadsheets. You may also want to contribute to the list of sources - just let me know and I will grant permission to edit the Google-Document.

Spreadsheets:
rss-sources
actors' websites

As a result of long discussions and collaborate writing, DW-AKADEMIE has just published a new policy paper on Media Development:

Helmut Osang u.a., Communication. Participation. Development. DW-AKADEMIE Policy Paper on Media Development Cooperation, Bonn 2010

Read more on dw-world.de

Download the paper (pdf)

Presenting current projects...

Very recently, I got the hint to check out a service called "Prezi". It turned out to be a fantastic experience. Prezi is a new way of doing presentations. Moving away from slides and bulletpoints, it concentrates on providing a consistent "whole picture". Actually hard to explain, so you will have to see for yourself.

I embed my first two Prezis here. One is held in German language and tries to apply "Managing a Football-Club" to a theoretical project-development-outline provided by "Kellogg Foundation". The second one gives an outline of DW-AKADEMIE media-development projects in People's Republic of Laos (see also: http://training.dw-world.de/laos).

Country Profiles on Delicious

These days I am compiling data for Country-Profiles (Bhurma, Cambodia, Laos, Nepal, Viet Nam) for Deutsche Welle-Akademie, Team Asia.

To keep track of the online-sources I use, I registered with 'delicious' (one of the most popular social-bookmarking services) and created a public profile.
If you are interested in worldwide (plus regional - S-E-Asia - in particular) statistics on People, Geography, Economy, Culture, Politics, Development Cooperation and especially Media-Development, feel free to visit

My delicious Bookmarks

You do share bookmarks yourself? You think, I might be interested? Go ahead and write an email or comment. Thank you in advance.

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Digital revolution?

On yesterday's jour fixe of "FoME" I talked to Chris about the possible opportunities of twitter and co. for "online citizenship". I now wanted to know more and therefor created a news-searching Pipe. Queries are: ALL=twitter+internet+web+change+digital+revolution

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DA-News

As announced recently, I started building sub-pipes to my "News-Imp" and am now happy to present first results. Below you'll find a gadget with weekly news on development assistance & -cooperation: "DA-News (beta)".

To get started, I combined strict searches for queries:

- "international+development+cooperation+assistance+foreign+aid"
- "development+cooperation+agency+assistance+aid"
- "Entwicklungszusammenarbeit"
- "Entwicklungshilfe"
- "Entwicklungspolitik"

Results are then filtered for unique titles and sorted by publishing date and language in descending order.
English language only; German language only; Both German and English language

DA-News (beta):
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(updated Wed, Feb. 18th 2009)

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Up next

To make use of the flexibility of my news-fetching Yahoo-Pipe, I will now start preparing several news-dossiers. First of all, I will focus on German and international development aid ("DA-News").

If you are interested in using the Pipe yourself, feel free to do so or
contact me to ask about the possibility of ordering your individual dossier.

(updated Tue, Feb. 17th 2009)

Laos News Dossier

First example of what I am planning to compile here can be seen below: a self-updating online-news-dossier on Laos (South-East-Asia), where DW-Academy is planning to cooperate with local radio authorities setting up new radio-content in Savannakhet province.

My job was to ensure an easy way of gathering relevant online-news and publish them as barrier-free as possible. This was reached using 'Yahoo-Pipes' and 'bloglines'. The complete documentation can be found here.

Laos News:
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