Tag Archives: feedburner

An experiment in creating an ‘Auto-Debunker’ twitter account

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As the conspiracy theories flew around last Friday, one in particular caught fire: the idea that the News Of The World might have been closed down because it would then allow for its assets – i.e. incriminating evidence – to be destroyed.

Perhaps because it was published under the Reuters brand (although the byline abrogated them of any responsibility for its contents) by the end of the day it had accumulated over 4,000 retweets.

I had already personally tweeted a couple of those users to point out that comments on the article had quickly debunked its argument. And by 6.26 that evening David Allen Green had published an explanation of the flaws in a piece at the New Statesman.

But people were still retweeting: how to connect the two?

Creating @autodebunker

It took me all of 20 minutes to hack together a simple automated service that would reply to people retweeting the Reuters blog post. Continue reading →

Which blog platform should I use? A blog audit

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When people start out blogging they often ask what blogging platform they should use – WordPress or Blogger? Tumblr or Posterous? It’s impossible to give an answer, because the first questions should be: who is going to use it, how, and what and who for?

To illustrate how the answers to those questions can help in choosing the best platform, I decided to go through the 35 or so blogs I have created, and why I chose the platforms that they use. As more and more publishing platforms have launched, and new features added, some blogs have changed platforms, while new ones have made different choices to older ones. Continue reading →

Data for journalists: understanding XML and RSS

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If you are working with data chances are that sooner or later you will come across XML – or if you don’t, then, well, you should do. Really.

There are some very useful resources in XML format – and in RSS, which is based on XML – from ongoing feeds and static reference files to XML that is provided in response to a question that you ask. All of that is for future posts – this post attempts to explain how XML is relevant to journalism, and how it is made up.

What is XML?

XML is a language which is used for describing information, which makes it particularly relevant to journalists – especially when it comes to interrogating large sets of data.

If you wanted to know how many doctors were privately educated, or what the most common score was in the Premiership last season, or which documents were authored by a particular civil servant, then XML may be useful to you. Continue reading →