Live with Zane Safrit this morning
June 18, 2008 by Andy Brudtkuhl · Leave a Comment
I will be discussing IowaFlood.com with Zane Safrit live this morning on BlogTalkRadio at 9:30 AM CST.
Zane Safrit talks about small business, innovation, word-of-mouth, leadership, generating positive cash-flows, topgrading, social media, blogs and bloggers, the economy…maybe even current events like politics. It’s personal, passionate, opinionated. And helpful.
We’ll be discussing social media and its convergence during disasters. We’ll be welcoming questions! Enjoy.
UPDATE: Here is the show…
Building IowaFlood.com
June 13, 2008 by Andy Brudtkuhl · 1 Comment
I’ve been asked a several times how I built IowaFlood.com and how it was done in 2 hours. Even though this is my business, I will share the secrets with you - because we are about education first here at 48Web.
Platform: WordPress
We are, self-admittedly, WordPress ninjas here at 48Web. Most of the projects we work on use it as a platform - proving it is not just a blogging tool. WordPress is the CMS / blog platform that powers the IowaFlood.com website. It gets auto updated from RSS feeds from Google, National Weather Service, Yahoo! Pipes, and others. Most of the main content (ie Videos and Pictures) are manually blogged by me. And we used a popular WordPress theme, called Morning After - which by this time has been heavily customized by me.
Engine: Yahoo! Pipes
I have used Yahoo! Pipes for many projects and there was no where else to look when the need came up. Pipes are doing two things for IowaFlood.com. First off I am using it to search, parse, and aggregate multiple news sources for posting to the website. Secondly, it provides the “Social Media Firehouse” widget you see on the top right that aggregates information from Flickr, YouTube and other sources based on a context I provide it.
Aggregator: Custom
The aggregator portion is some software I wrote that powers a number of websites, including IowaBlogs.net and centraliowabloggers.com. Basically it takes the output of Yahoo! Pipes and auto posts it to WordPress via an API wrapper I wrote to the XML-RPC API built into WordPress. This runs on a timed basis which is how the website is fed a lot of content.
Social: Twitter
The social tool of choice was obvious - Twitter. With the local #dmtweetup Twitter community in Des Moines I knew it would be easy to mobilize. In order to effectively aggregate the tweets into the system I asked everyone discussing the flood to use a hashtag - #IowaFlood. Using Twemes.com I created a hashtag widget that you see on the front page of IowaFlood.com.
Contributions: Many tools
In order to make it easy for as many people to contribute as possible I used a few things. First I set up a form at WuFoo so people could share their stories and upload pictures for me to post on the website. Secondly, I allow people to setup their own account on WordPress using the “Contributor” role so they can post content themselves. I asked that people upload pictures to Flickr using the tag #IowaFlood. Then, a Flickr group was created as well to organize the photos. I used Meebo to create an embeddable chat room for real time discussions. People also started using Twitter to communicate many messages to me, such as alerts and places needing sandbag help, for me to post on the website. And last I set up an email address for people who wanted to forward pictures to me (iowaflood[at]gmail.com). And last, we are using PayPal for donations that will go to the United Way of Central Iowa.
I think that’s about it… If you have any questions, leave a comment.
IowaFlood.com 72 Hours Later
June 13, 2008 by Andy Brudtkuhl · 2 Comments
Wow.
What a ride the last few days have been. It’s been about 72 hours since I launched IowaFlood.com and I can say I have learned a lot, and not just technical but about Word of Mouth, Citizen Journalism, our local community, and the generosity and communal nature of Iowans. So almost 72 hours, 3 servers, and 40,000 hits later let me recap the story.
First off, I have been asked on several occasions why I built this website. My first response was, “Because I can”. This was not meant to be arrogant or egotistical - just straightforward. I knew the mainstream media would not embrace the social aspect (at least not til I showed them how). I know the technology like the back of my hand (more on that later). And I knew I could get the word out - through the local twitter community.
My second response is that social media and citizen journalism are, by nature, a de-centralized system. There’s conversation going on in Twitter and on blogs. There are photos being uploaded to Flickr and forwarded via email. There are videos popping up on YouTube. Unless you have your ear to the social ground this great content may have passed you up. Enter IowaFlood.com. The goal was to centralize this ecosystem of user generated content into an organized flow for the mainstream public to follow.
Did you just do it to make money off ads and generate traffic from a disaster? This is a valid question, since I do run ads on the website. The answer, wholeheartedly, is no. I did this for my home state of Iowa and everyone who is looking for information on a natural disaster. I did it for social media and citizen journalism. I did it for you. The money from ads (which is approaching $5) will go to pay for the website, which thus far has cost about 50x the ad revenue to scale the hosting, database, and bandwidth. This was all gladly paid for by 48Web. Any money made on advertisements above and behind the hosting costs will go to charity.
I want to thank the local Des Moines twitter community. I just built a website - you created the value. I also want to thank everyone for their nice comments and support - that makes it all worth doing.
– Feedback –
WNYC Interview on The Takeaway (MP3 shortly)
Nathan Wright on Citizen Journalism
Todd Mundt on HyperLocal Reporting
Jake Bouma
Rush Nigut
Troy Rutter
Nathanial Payne
I also want to thank the Des Moines Register for contributing to the site. Their cooperation was much needed and much appreciated.
And more coming in…
