Archive for the Politics Tag

SFTW: How to grab useful political data with the They Work For You API

It’s been over 2 years since I stopped doing the ‘Something for the Weekend’ series. I thought I would revive it with a tutorial on They Work For You and Google Refine… If you want to add political context to a spreadsheet – say you need to know what political parties a list of constituencies voted for, or the MPs
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Hyperlocal Voices: Darryl Chamberlain, 853 Blog

Having worked for the BBC News Entertainment website for a decade, Darryl Chamberlain took voluntary redundancy and set up the widely successful 853 Blog. As part of the Hyperlocal Voices series he shares some of the secrets of his success. 1) Who where the people behind the blog, and what where their backgrounds? 853’s all mine. My background’s actually in
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Ultralocal Blogging Roundup. Talk About Local ’09, Guardian, Wired Mag

There have been several events and reports worthy of note in the last week in the world of local blogs and websites . I thought it worth a roundup, and some reflections

BBC Free: Help us persuade the BBC to open their RSS feeds up

The internet blows my mind. Ryan Carson opened my eyes to the power of it a few months ago. We can sit down and create a blog or web application and have it instantly accessible to the world. That’s unique, and it’s exciting. We’re asking the BBC to join us in this creativity. Today, we’re launching BBC Free – it’s a campaign
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I smell a government rat in my news

As traditional media outlets close down, the relative importance of non-market players becomes more important. Governments around the world were quick to see the opportunities for their news agencies. From Xinhua (China) to ITAR-TASS (Russia), from AFP (half of its budget comes from state subscriptions) to Voice of America, governments are trying to shape the world’s public opinion. The coverage
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Obama’s way around mainstream media

She was trying to make sure media (literally) used the “right” image of Barack Obama during the campaign. Jodi Williams was one of the many young brains behind Barack Obama’s media campaign. I met her at the Digital News Affairs conference in Brussels to talk about the digital changes in campaigning and dealing with the media. She had no doubt
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Council elections mashup – help improve it

I’ve very quickly created a Yahoo! Pipes mashup for today’s council and London mayor elections in the UK. All it does at the moment is take the RSS feed for Tweetscan searches for ‘election’, ‘voted’, ‘voting’, ‘vote’, ‘Ken Livingstone‘ and ‘Boris Johnson‘, gets rid of duplicate results, and spits out a feed. UPDATE: Now it also takes feeds from Google
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