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).

Absence

Since the end of June, a lot of effort went into the realisation of a new DW-AKADEMIE Blog about the current projects in Laos. This also explains my absence here during past weeks.

Of course I will try to comment on the development of and the ideas behind the blog and everything connected as soon as possible. Until then, I'd like to refer you to "Supporting Media Development in Laos", where I just recently published Team Asia's DW-GMF09 Symposium Presentation Draft: