I’m sure many of you are familiar with the Twitter convention of hash tags, and the popular #lazyweb tag used when you are too lazy to find the answer to a question that you’re pretty sure someone out there on the world wide web will know. So you tweet the question and add #lazyweb.
What I love about this idea is that it’s a passive impulse that taps into all the frantic activity of the web so simply. And now I’m hoping to use it for a question that I have…
We’ve been thinking a lot about how to facilitate conversations about our books on the internet (as I’m sure all publishers have been doing too). One way to do this is to try and aggregate content ‘out there’ back into a central location for our book/s, so you can see all the conversation in one place. (I’m simplifying, I know…)
But this kind of aggregation is not easy and is not the only element needed in the ‘content mix’ – we know that.
So my question is:
dear #lazyweb do you know any examples of really good or clever or fun ‘centralized’ content (aka aggregated book chat). I know about Amazon… any others? OK thx!
3 Comments
Hey James,
Not at all book chat but the usage of aggregated content by http://www.skittles.com/ is awesome. Also from an implementation point of view Yahoo pipes allows for easy integration of lots of feeds, data points into one output http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ – check out this simple search on pipes: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/search?q=books&x=0&y=0
And ofcourse as you have already mentioned twitter itself is a brilliant aggregator around themes, e.g. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=dan+brown – the twitter api allows for more complex integrations via php and other such languages:. http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Libraries
I invite you to check out lazytweet since you’re asking questions with the #lazyweb tag. Its purpose in life is to help get your lazyweb/tweet questions answered.
Rich and Ryan – thanks for your suggestions.
I did see the Skittles thing – great strategy really, despite the sabotage.
Yahoo Pipes is a good tool – I should get closer to that and see to what extent the pipes can be refined to aggregate content – e.g. to discern UK edition chat vs US edition…?