It’s easy to get overwhelmed by fast-moving international stories that roll through online and social media like wildfire. Which sources are worth paying attention to? When everyone sounds excited and urgent, how can you tell what’s most important? How can you gauge accuracy and context?
Current‘s Robin Sloan, the generalist writer and media nerd who once worked at Poynter, where he created “EPIC 2014” with Matt Thompson, used a few basic tools to pull together a curated page that provides a quick “dashboard” view of what’s happening online regarding the Iran election. His #IranElection tracker for the easily overwhelmed represents an approach that any individual, group, journalist or news organization could take to offer value and engagement through selected aggregation.
I asked Sloan about this project, with an eye toward how other journalists and news organizations could create a similar project to help cut through news overload.
Amy Gahran: How did you build this dashboard? What tools did you use, and how long did it take?
Robin Sloan: It’s a very simple architecture — mostly just an HTML page that’s pulling in a bunch of feeds and using them to populate the page. A Javascript library called jQuery does all the heavy lifting. I’m sending many of the feeds through Yahoo Pipes for various filters — to select only the items with the keywords “Iran,” “Tehran” or “#iranelection,” or to select only tweets with links, for example.
A few other feeds require filtering that Pipes can’t do, so for those I wrote functions in Ruby and served them up as a feed using a framework called Sinatra. (It’s like Rails or Django, except much, much simpler.)
It all took about six hours on Saturday, not including an hour-long break in the middle when I got frustrated and wanted to throw my laptop at the wall.
How did you select the sources you’re displaying there?
Sloan: To be honest, I just selected the stuff I’d been looking at and had found valuable. I wanted to “aggregate the aggregators” — pull in feeds from places that were already doing a lot of filtering themselves. Thus, I pulled from the New York Times Lede blog, Tweetmeme, Current, etc. I definitely didn’t want any raw feeds, nor even any that were particularly high-volume.
Do you have any limit to the number of sources you want to display at any given time to help keep it manageable? How is the dashboard evolving? I see you invite people to suggest new sources. Have you been adding new sources? Dropping any?
Sloan: I want to keep it really lean. More is not better in this case, at least given my objectives. I decided to add a link to the Huffington Post‘s Nico Pitney after several people on Twitter said he was doing a good job tracking the story and was worth following. I might also impose a “new source in, old source out” rule.
What have you learned from this effort that could help other people or organizations better prepare for or implement their own similar dashboard projects, on this topic or others?
Sloan: Well, the good news is that it’s not difficult, technically speaking. Somebody more capable than I am could have thrown this together in half the time, I’m sure. The other thing is that my instinct for the content and design came straight from my own experience as a (somewhat frustrated) consumer of news about Iran. So I think there’s something to be said for watching your own behavior closely and honestly, and then using that as a starting point. Oh, and I wish I would have done it four days sooner!
