Cultivating tangible change
Managing News
Situation: The way public conversations happen has changed. Mainstream media outlets and large companies are no longer the primary messengers. People now have access to the megaphone through the internet, and they are using it to share news, ideas, and opinions on just about everything.
There are hundreds of millions of blogs, niche websites, community forums, videos, and photos online. More conversations move online everyday, and increasingly people are turning to them to get their news and information. The power to communicate to a wide audience has shifted.
Organizations need to follow these emerging conversations to know the full story about their issues and brands, and they need to step in and engage these new messengers to influence those conversations. But how can they possibly listen in and make sense of so much chatter?
Solution: We built Managing News to help organizations listen to the news and conversations happening online and identify which are the most important so they can respond.
Managing News is a news aggregator that can be used collaboratively by teams to read and respond to the news. Users can enter a topic, a company, a brand, or a part of the world they’re interested in, and the system will track the chatter on these topics within minutes of it appearing online. It then analyzes the chatter to help identify hot topics and emerging trends.
Strategy Focus
Surviving Information Overload: FeedAPI Mail Watches Your Mailing Lists
FeedAPI Mail Plugin Lets You Aggregate Your Email With Your News Feeds
FeedAPI Mail Plugin Lets You Aggregate Your Email With Your News Feeds
Keeping up with all the information we get every day is no easy job. We follow hundreds of websites using feed readers and get hundreds of emails every day. If that wasn't enough, there are new sites everyday producing their own streams of information, sites like Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and probably someone is launching a new one as I'm writing this. We definitely need help to manage all this information, so we use tools like email filters, feed aggregators and readers, and tagging tools.
Just one of the tools mentioned above means one more piece of software or website to deal with. And that means that when we find some other tool that can mix what two tools do into just one, we have at least some hope that the next day we'll have some spare time to do the real work. That's what FeedAPI Mail does for FeedAPI in Drupal - adds one more functionality to the mix.
Now we have the first proof-of-concept module for a FeedAPI plugin that adds mailing lists into the equation. With this plugin, you can follow mailing lists and enjoy the same features available for the other content. It treats individual mailing lists as if they were web feeds, allowing the same features for incoming emails as for the rest of the content, including automatic tagging (and geotagging), reading the emails in a single news reader, easy sharing with your team, and so on. Here's a look at it running in our team news aggregator/analyzer Managing News:
This FeedAPI Mail module works together with Mailhandler and FeedAPI, which grabs the rest of the feeds and presents them in a single web interface. In addition it has also a specific mail reader UI that can display threads and authors, which puts single emails in context.
To get started we need a mail account and to set up a mail inbox with Mailhandler so emails are read and made into nodes. Next we need to add a 'Mailing list' and set it up with the mailing list email address so incoming emails can be classified as coming from different lists. Then we just need to subscribe our email address to the mailing list (which may take some manual steps to handle confirmation emails), and we're all set.
What's to Come with FeedAPI Mail