Using n0tice to track conference coverage
Posted: February 12, 2013 Filed under: Features, user-help | Tags: conference, delegate, hashgordon, n0tice, noticeboard, organise, storify, twitter Comments OffPicture the scenario – you’ve got the time agreed, bought your ticket, travelled across the country and, finally, you’re there, tweeting away from the conference. You know you’ll not forget that speaker/link/picture/reference because it resonated so well with you but then you return to the office to share it and……it’s nowhere to be seen. If you’d had the foresight to favourite some tweets then maybe you can gather your thoughts – or hope someone creates a Storify which happens to curate your choice of tweets – or alternatively, have everything automatically tracked in n0tice for later, leaving you the time to concentrate on post-conference socialising. We’ve already tracked several events using the n0tice tools so here’s how to set it up to capture everything from an event and give yourself a break.
- You’ll need a user account – sign up at n0tice.com.
- Once logged in, go to the ‘my noticeboards’ link and click to ‘set up a new noticeboard’.
- The noticeboard will be the place where all your content is saved and published online – think of it as your workspace – but it is public on the internet so give it a name which will mean something to people searching for the event.
- Log into feedton0tice.com and follow the instructions to set up the feeds you require eg. twitter, flickr etc. using the guide here.
- Sign off, sit back and enjoy your conference.
Once your ‘bot’ (automated feed) has captured everything on the noticeboard, there several things you can do next. Check through the feed and easily create your own report of the events main points by selecting the ones you want and using the facility to embed the tweets into a story, like this from last week’s Virtual Community Summit in London. @CarolineRadar tweets: The offline world is a minefield – managing expectations of what moderators should manage is very difficult, esp parents #vircomm13
@AthikurRehman tweets: Online Strategies should be driven by #SocialMediaAnalytics Monitoring can help brands with great insights #vircomm13 @VirCommSummit
And you can write a commentary around the individual items in a similar way to Storify. @vdimauro tweets: fantastic storify board of #vircomm13 – proud to have been a part of this amazing day! http://t.co/SfwRxzjL via @emoderation
With pictures, you can use the HashGordon.com app to create a picture gallery like the one at the top of this blog poast. I created that by using the filter to only publish the few pictures I selected from the entire number by ‘n0ticing’ them. There’s full details about using this tool here.
Where will you be on Keep Cycling Day? Find out how to join in here
Posted: February 4, 2013 Filed under: Features, partnership | Tags: #keepcycling, chocolate, cycling, divine, n0tice, noticeboard 2 Comments »
From adapting safety googles for bad weather to continuing to commute on two wheels – it seems there’s nothing that will stop some of our n0tice-ers from keeping on cycling.
Stories and pictures of intrepid cycling have been coming into the dedicated Keep Cycling noticeboard over the winter months – so it’s time to celebrate your efforts.
Just check out these to get a flavour of what’s been going on:
Photo by detailista: “Cycling into the sunrise. Bring on nights of pushing home into sunsets.
#keepcycling”
Photo by alexwhittaker: “Beautiful morning in the park #keepcycling #eastlondon”
All that effort deserves some reward, so our delicious partners at Divine Chocolate have come up with something extra special this month.
As well as a prize for snapping and sharing the best view from wherever you’re cycling, all you London cyclists can also claim free chocolate on Keep Cycling Day which is Tuesday 5 March.
All you need to do is cycle up to the Divine pop up shop at Seven Dials in Covent Garden on day and chocolate rewards will be yours – just take your bike/helmet.
The pop up shop will be open for two weeks from the 25th of Feb but you’ll have to pedal there on the dedicated #keepcycling day to claim your prize.
But if you’re not near Covent Garden, don’t worry – there’s a lot of Divine goodies up for grabs wherever you are. To join in simply snap your favourite cycling view and help us to map the country’s top cycling route as follows:
Post it to the #keepcycling noticeboard at www.keepcycling.n0tice.com with Twitter or Instagram.
Make sure you turn location on and hashtag your post with #keepcycling, to see your pictures and reports pop up on this n0ticeboard, and feature in a guide that showcases the best of cycling this season.
Featured noticeboard: Stourbridge
Posted: January 8, 2013 Filed under: Features | Tags: abigailedge, hyperlocal, journalism, n0tice, news, noticeboard, stourbridge 1 Comment »
We kick off 2013 with news of a new local website on n0tice which seeks to cover the Stourbridge area in the Midlands. It’s creator Abigail Edge tells us more about why she’s set up Stourbridge.n0tice.com.
Firstly, I asked her to tell us a little about her passions and interests
I grew up in Stourbridge, in the Midlands, but only recently moved back to the area after more than ten years living away in London, Bristol, Plymouth and Leeds. I’m a journalist and web editor currently working at Midland News Association (though Stourbridge.n0tice.com is a personal project). Previously I was online editor of ThisisBristol.co.uk and also managed Northcliffe Digital’s Local People sites in the South West, which is what sparked my interest in hyperlocal news.
My favourite things are going to gigs and festivals, rambling around the countryside and exploring new places – last summer I spent three weeks backpacking around Sri Lanka. I’m a member of my local running club and am currently attempting to learn photography and Spanish, all to varying levels of success. I’m also a self-confessed social media fiend – you can find me on Twitter @abigailedge or WordPress www.abigailedge.co.uk.
Why did you set it up and who is involved?
I set up the noticeboard to create an online community space for people living in and around Stourbridge – somewhere they can share news, events, photos and anything else of interest. It’s early days and at the moment it’s just me running it, but once the word spreads I’d like to see more people involved.
Tell us the three best things about Stourbridge
The noticeboard covers Stourbridge and the surrounding area, including Wordsley, Wollaston, Dudley, Hagley and Norton. It’s a relatively small town with a population of around 55,000 but there’s a lot that goes on. The best three things… ?
– Birmingham, the UK’s second city, is just 30 minutes away by train but Stourbridge is also surrounded by some really beautiful countryside, from the rolling Clent Hills to Kinver Edge with its rock houses carved into the woodland sandstone ridge.
– It’s got a deep-set arty, bohemian streak and a thriving local music scene. Cult bands The Wonder Stuff, Pop Will Eat Itself and Ned’s Atomic Dustbin all hail from Stourbridge, making the town something of a Mecca for NME readers in the late eighties/early nighties!
– Stourbridge people are friendly and down to earth, while the town itself has some great real ale pubs and independent shops. My favourites are The Duke William on Coventry Street and Scary Canary Clothing in Victoria Passage (scarycanaryclothing.co.uk).
What do hope to achieve with the noticeboard?
I’d like to see people using Stourbridge.n0tice.com to highlight the best of Stourbridge, whether it’s to share a great photo or to let people know about events, offers and news in the town. I’d especially like to see local venues, clubs, businesses and community groups getting involved. And I’d like to get everyone using the #n0ticestourbridge hashtag on Twitter and Instagram! Essentially it’s a public space that’s open to everyone – how it develops really depends on how people decide to use it.
* Visit the Stourbridge noticeboard here. Are you doing something with n0tice that you’d like to share? Whether it’s a hyperlocal, a mapping project or maybe a photography challenge we’d love to hear about it. Contact me via the comments below or via the email Sarah@n0tice.com.
Canadian newspaper readers map their favourite sledge sites with n0tice
Posted: December 11, 2012 Filed under: Features | Tags: calgary, calgaryherald, canada, n0tice, noticeboard, sled. sledding, sledging Comments Off
One of Canada’s biggest city newspapers has turned to n0tice for help with a very Canadian issue – sledging. I asked features editor Tom Babin to tell us about the crowdmapping project that’s underway at http://calgarysledding.n0tice.com.
Q. First, could you tell us a little about the Calgary Herald?
A. The Calgary Herald is the major metro daily newspaper of Calgary, a city of a million people on the Canadian prairies. The paper has been around since 1883, and in the last number of years, our whole operation, like most newspapers, has been shifting its focus onto the Web. We’re the biggest media site in the city, and one of the biggest metro newspaper websites in Canada.
Q. You call it sledding, we call it sledging – just how important a pastime is it for people there?
A. A true Canadian would actually call it tobogganing. Technically a toboggan is a more traditional wooden sled with a rounded front end. If you buy a good one and use it for years, they can get suicidally fast – great fun! But we use the words sledding and tobogganing interchangeably.
We have long winters here, so sledding is a fun pastime for families, especially those with kids. And we’re a skiing city – the Rockies are only about an hour drive away – but that can be expensive, so tobogganing is a nice free alternative you can do in the city. However, finding the best hills in the city can be tough, especially for newcomers, so we thought we’d ask readers to share their favourites, and we’ve been plotting them on a map.
Q. How did you hear about n0tice and how are you using it?
A. We’re big on crowdsourcing, and we’re always looking for ways to improve the way we present reader information. Crowdsourced maps can be very labour intensive. We did a big project last year in which we crated dozens of maps with community data, and it was a huge amount of work, so when we came across n0tice being used on the Guardian website, we liked it’s potential. We’ve been asking people to either post their sledding hills directly onto the n0ticeboard, or just let us know by email and social media, after which we will post that data ourselves. Most of the response has come through social media, usually people tweeting us a location, but it hasn’t taken us long to post that into the n0ticeboard ourselves.
Q. What sort of response has there been to the sledding noticeboard?
A. It’s been really good. There were more sledding hills plotted in the first day than I expected, and many of them were unknown to me, so already it’s a good resource for Calgarians. Sometimes, a good toboggan hill is a bit like a good fishing hole in that people tend to keep them secret so they don’t get overrun with people, so we’re happy that people are sharing. We’re going to keep building on it through the winter.
Q. Any plans for the future?
A. We get a lot of reader response from social media, so we’re also looking forward to using some of the mapping capabilities directly from Twitter and Instagram. We’d love to get more reader photos in there.
If you’re using n0tice for an interesting project. We’d love to hear from you and pass your experience on here at the blog – contact sarah@n0tice.com or leave your details via the comments below.
n0tice helps champion live music with #gdngigs
Posted: November 27, 2012 Filed under: Features | Tags: gdngigs, guardian, live, music, n0tice, noticeboard, venues Comments Off
The Guardian Music team is using n0tice’s crowdmapping capabilities to great effect to help its readers share live gig reports and pictures from across the country.
Launching the project at the weekend, Adam Boult explained that it’s “an attempt to capture unforgettable moments at gigs for people to share and enjoy.”
“Our hope is that the Guardian’s live music map will help people discover local venues and artists and go out and see them more. And those who know about great local music will have a better platform for sharing their passion.”
The initiative to champion gigs comes at an interesting point in time for live venues – rules governing the licensing of venues have been significantly relaxed and, as The Observer reported on Sunday, the music industry has never been so reliant on revenue from live performance.
Tom Lamont writes: “If bands in 2012 make any money for themselves and for their labels they are likely to do so from the dogged touring of rooms big and small.”
Here’s how you can join in
Report on your favourite venue and encourage others to go there more often. Tell everyone in the area about an up and coming local band worth checking out.
If you’re in a band, you could use it to share behind-the-scenes gig pictures, and ask your fans to post about your shows. The Vaccines, Band of Horses, Dry the River, Tegan and Sara, and Aluna George are among those who have already been using the #gdngig hashtag – see their posts here.
While not every post will find its way to the map, the full stream of activity can be found on the #gdngig noticeboard here, including forthcoming events near you.
Bands and artists can list their gigs on the noticeboard, and venues can post events they are hosting.
As with all our n0tice developments, developers can reuse the Guardian Live Gig Map code or tap into the n0tice APIs directly. All that is documented here on n0tice.org.
Help us keep the UK cycling this winter
Posted: November 6, 2012 Filed under: Features | Tags: #keepcycling, bikes, cycling, cyclists, ice, n0tice, noticeboard, snow, winter Comments Off
Photo by emilrydberg: “all i want to do is ride my bike #keepcycling”
That about sums it up! Cycling’s not just for the summer which is why we’re sharing your winter cycling tips stories and photos to inspire people to keep cycling.
Research has show that between July and December, the number of people cycling in the UK drops 68%.
This time just after the clocks have gone back often means the bikes go back in the shed. Maybe it’s because of safety concerns, not knowing how to prepare for the harsher climate, or just that people don’t know how enjoyable winter cycling can be.
Here at n0tice.com we want to help the UK to #keepcycling this winter – and we’re on the hunt for the Winter Cycling City of 2012.
To join in is simple, take a picture of your favourite winter view, or write a report about what needs to change about winter cycling, and pin it to the map of the #keepcycling n0ticeboard with n0tice, Twitter or Instagram.
Make sure you turn location on and hashtag your post with #keepcycling to see your pictures, and reports pop up on the Keep Cycling n0ticeboard at www.keepcycling.n0tice.com.
Your pictures will be part of a visual Winter Cycling guide from n0tice that will show the most celebrated pictures from different locations around the country.
Using Feedwax.com to curate information
Posted: October 23, 2012 Filed under: Features, user-help | Tags: curate, feeds, feedwax, n0tice, noticeboard, rss 1 Comment »
Picture illustrating feeds in action by francescopozzi on Flickr.
In among the new features launched with n0tice 2.0 is the platform’s first internal app - Feedwax.com.
It’s already attracted some attention from tech-savvy journalists like Sarah Marshall so how does it all work?
Essentially it’s a feed curator that geocodes the content. As others have pointed out in recent work in this area, the geo-tagging of content isn’t as commonplace as you might expect but, once geographical data has been attached to a piece of content, there’s a wealth of options available for the journalist or blogger to explore in delivering it to new platforms, services, tools or environments such as Augmented Reality.
Feedwax.com can help with this. Here’s a couple of scenarios to illustrate ways to use it:
1. Monitoring or tracking a feed of information
This could be for your own benefit as someone interested in a particular dataset or for live publication.
I’ve recently set up two such accounts one (PlanBot) which automatically publishes the planning applications from my local council and other one (HagueBot) which tracks my local MP’s constituency activity. The PlanBot provides an alternative to the local reporter’s unenviable task of wading through printed council papers and has the advantage of running in realtime rather than waiting for the local town hall to compile and distribute the details. Because the area being covered is geographically small I felt there was a benefit in letting all applications through but it is possible to add a staging-post and simply select those likely to be of most interest for your readers for publication in larger districts or if you want more selection control for editorial reasons.
The datasets to produce this feed can be found thanks to the hard work of OpenlyLocal.com here: http://openlylocal.com/councils/all
The second case (HagueBot) takes one feed (the RSS automatically created on the www.theyworkforyou.com site) but blends this with a feed created via Feedwax.com which searches twitter for the MP. Any combination of feed or search can be used across all the major social media platforms and again, it can be published direct or to an internally controlled list.
2. Creating a story map from activity on the internet
Because every piece of content is geo-tagged, the content being produced on n0tice.com can be easily mapped (lots of examples, and instruction on how to do that here – link) and now the feed curator gives anyone covering a topic another tool in gathering the required data from activity that’s already out there on the web ready to map.
To do this means setting up a noticeboard specifically for the story – it’s a process that takes about 1min – think of it as your project space for the story. Then select the searches you’d like to build feeds for eg. a specific hashtag on twitter and feed it into your noticeboard.
A sudden urge to capture the recent skydive from space shows this in action – the feed gathered some images from instagram and tweets with the hashtag during the few hours I left it running and automatically updated a noticeboard set up for the story here: http://livejump.n0tice.com/. It was just a test experiment and took me less than five minutes to set up and start running but shows the potential using data generated on the social web to create story maps.
Follow this step-by-step guide to start building and curating feeds using Feedwax.com.
How to use Feedwax.com
Posted: October 23, 2012 Filed under: user-help | Tags: api, apps, feeds, feedwax, help, howto, n0tice, noticeboard, rss 3 Comments »Firstly you will need a n0tice.com user account and a noticeboard to post the feeds to. These could be set up for the specific story you want to create and make it clear they are automated or simply be part of your standard user profile.
Armed with these, start the process by signing into the service at http://feedton0tice.com before proceeding to the URL www.feedwax.com in a seprate browser.
The first screen shows a series of grey buttons for existing social media platforms – take your pick by clicking on the one you want to work with. If you want to geotag an RSS feed from some other source, click on the words ‘FeedWax geocoder’ in the text underneath.
On the second screen. Replace the word ‘noticed’ with whatever search term you want to build into a feed. With twitter these will often be hashtags but could also be a certain user name eg.@whoever. Or a mixture of two or more terms to refine and limit the search further.
Once complete, click the red button to ‘feed this into n0tice’
If you want to restrict the location of your search to a particular place, you’ll need to find it’s latitutde and longitutde. The map on the right of the screen can help you do this, or use a 3rd party service such as http://www.latlong.net.
The first time you click the ‘feed to notice’ button will show you a list of the content which will go into your feed and then you will be taken off to the http://freedton0tice.com part of the journey where you signed in earlier and ne asked to authorise the app. Once you have clicked the button ‘authorise access’ you will see a blue button to ‘add new feed’.
Clicking this will open up a form which has your feed from feedwax.com pre-filled in the URL.
Choose the noticeboard (project space) that you want the feed to post into from the dropdown list. If you’d like all the information located to one geography, enter its lat and long reading in the boxes and choose whether you’d like it all automated or to go to a staging post for you to approve. If you tick, scheduled, it is automated. (You can always come back and check this later if you’d rather try it manually first.)
Once you click ‘add new feed, all the content you are being offered to import for the first time will be presented to you on the next screen.
When you’re happy that the feed is containing items that you were expecting, import to your noticeboard and it will publish immediately.
If you choose the automatic option, that’s it, the site will update everytime there’s new content to post. If you chose to do it manually, you’ll need to go back into the ‘your feeds’ menu and click to import at whichever period of time suits your project.
When you click scheduled and it displays all the items that are available, on the first occasion you’ll need to scroll down the page and
there’s a button to ‘add geotagged items’
The imported feeds still attribute the original source and any other meta data associated with it such as time and date so, if ther content was some days, months or even years earlier, it will show at that point on the noticeboard’s history.
Featured n0tice member: Mike Rawlins
Posted: October 9, 2012 Filed under: Features | Tags: hyperlocal, n0tice, noticeboard, users Comments Off
Updated iPhone app with new features
Posted: September 11, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: iPhone app, n0tice, noticeboard Comments OffWe’ve been working hard behind the scene to bring you version 1.3 of the n0tice iPhone app!
Download it today and share what’s going on in your area!
Find n0tice on Twitter: @n0tice
