During a catch-up chat with Dave Briggs he mentioned the Real Help Now site the government recently launched. I heard about this when at the time but hadn’t clicked as to how interesting it was. As Simon Dickson explains the back-end is an incredibly simple system for publishing links to useful information:
The news content is being managed through a Delicious account. When we spot a new item of interest, we tag it with the relevant region; then, when you click a region on the map, we call the relevant RSS feed in. The feeds give us everything we need; the Delicious tagging tools are excellent; and, of course, it also means Delicious users can interact directly with the account, if they so desire.
If you’re interested in how government departments are using social media tools it’s worth keeping tabs on Simon’s blog. He’s doing good work in that area.
Here’s how it works. The user bookmarks a web page and tags it “westmidlands”:
This goes into their Delicious account which is sucked into the Real Help Now website automatically.
And that’s it.
Using the Delicious bookmarking service as a way to collect and publish links is not a new concept – I use it to publish to at least three blogs I run using the Postalicious Wordpress plugin – but this implementation, populating and keeping current a normal-looking web page, got me thinking.
The first think is how astoundingly easy it is to put content on the site. As long as the user has the Delicious browser plugin installed all they have to do it hit the “Tag” button, tidy up the Title of the link, add a brief description (usually copied from the page in question), type the relevant region in the Tag box and hit Save. The rest is automatic. No training needed for daunting looking CMS admin pages. Just a 30 second operation.
The second thing is how this system can be applied to pretty much anything, especially on a local level. It’s the map that rings the big bell. In this case it’s divided into large national regions but it strikes me as a great model for geo-locating news on a very local level.
One of the problems with geotagging is the effort, however small, of getting the location data in. At best you need to place the object (a web page, photo, etc) on a map and at worst you need to figure out the longitude and latitude for the object and type it in. GPS can help with this by automatically adding location data to a photo, for example, but it’s not much use for bookmarking web pages.
But if you had a system for recognising specific words as locations and turning that into location data then you could take this simple publishing system and leverage it in some very interesting ways. It wouldn’t need to be accurate to a street level. Just look for the common names for a square-mile radius (for example the B5 postcode in Birmingham would match “Digbeth, Deritend, Custard Factory, Cheapside” and other labels unique that area) and add the coordinates.
That’s just one very simple and slightly kludgy application of the data but what happens to it once it’s in the system is almost irrelevant since we’re not exactly short of people to do interesting things with it (whether you ask then to or not). The big point, I think, is that the entry of the data is incredibly simple. When you enable to add valuable data to stuff without it getting in the way of their work or even without them realising they’re doing it, that’s when things get interesting.
“Social media advisor”, eh? I wonder how many of those will be left after the great shake out. Good luck to you, but I can’t help feeling a bit nervous about the number of social media advisors I’ve stumbled across recently. Somehow I don’t think the social media industry (which, I’ve no doubt, it will soon start calling itself, if it hasn’t already) is going to get us out of this hole, do you?
Blimey Joe. Here was me coming to moan about something and your grumpiness beat me to it. If social media advisors are a waste of time do let us know how you’re going to help get us out of the hole.
There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that using social media is the right solution for some businesses in helping them reach customers. Also, if we can build an industry out of social media (and there’s one being built around you in case you didn’t notice) then that’s jobs isn’t? You know, real jobs that a failing economy needs?
My reason for a visit to the comments was to point out that even though the Real Help Now site has an interesting use of delicious links the most recent West Midlands story on is from January. The regional recession website hasn’t been updated since then either. There’s no doubt plenty of stuff being done by agencies to support companies in the recession but as usual they haven’t learnt the art of actually telling us about it. And given how easy it is to tell us, as Pete’s example highlights, that a real shame.
I guess that leaves it to me to be grumpy commentator #3 and respond directly Pete’s post. Keeping things on topic, as it were.
The georeferencing bit can be done using a specific set of tags that function much like ’smart tags’ in Word documents. There’s at least one existing protocol – possibly a ‘geo’ microformat – and that there are scripts or applications which automate much of the process.
With that part simplified, you’ve got a semi-autmated bloggin system for whatever your favourite topics are. So I’m curious about trying it out on one of my own. Thanks for the tip.
@Joe
Amazing. I mention a government website purely because the technology is interesting and within hours I get a comment like yours. You guys are good! Be fascinating to see how you do your tracking
As for “social media advisor” I don’t like the term myself and expect it to be rolled into more established sectors (if you’ll excuse another word I don’t care much for) once everything settles down. And you’re right, there are a hell of a lot of snake oil salesmen rapidly moving into this area at the moment, which is weird when you’ve been doing this stuff for a decade. There’s a lot of hype and bullshit surrounding that which we call social media at the moment but, and it’s a big but, I do think it will fundamentally change the world on all sorts of levels in interesting ways. During that change there’s a role for people like me. When the change is done and it’s all mundane and normal there won’t be. That’s what I’m aiming for – my own redundancy.
But yeah, seriously impressed with your methods. Suspect I might passionately disagree with your aims but that’s not what this blog is about.