Google Alerts for @ciliphw

Yesterday I spent a happy afternoon creating some Google Alerts for a local library news feed (eventually this will go through @ciliphw). After playing about a bit with a few searches I decided on using Google Alerts because you can restrict your search to particular sources (e.g. Portsmouth News or Basingstoke Gazette). What I was finding if I tried a normal Google Search using keywords (like "hampshire) to restrict the search was that you just get a load of stuff that's not really relevant. I was really after news from local papers and Google Alerts indexes local papers and allows you to specify which papers you search.

The first step was to decide which papers to look for. The next step was to find out what Google Alerts calls them and create a search. For each newspaper I created an alert looking for articles containing any of the words "library" "libraries" "librarian" or "CILIP". For some papers I could see a few results and check that the articles were sort of relelvant. Others hadn't published anything on libraries recently so didn't display any results. In these cases I double checked that I had the source name right by taking out the key words. If the search then displayed other articles published in that paper I could be confident that I had the source name right and then put the keywords back in to create the alert.

Google Alerts allows you to output your alert either as an email or as a feed. I opted for feed but didn't change any of the other settings. This proved to be a mistake as, when I checked on the feeds this morning they'd picked up a load of (seemingly random) stuff. I think the answer is that Google Alerts can be restricted to certain media (e.g. Newspapers) or "Comprehensive". As I'd left the option set as comprehensive I think that (even though I'd restricted the search to a particular news source in each case) as well as picking up newspaper artciles the search was also picking up blogs and other sources. Now I've changed that setting to "News" so hopefully, when I check the feeds later they'll just contain published local news articles. Hopefully.

Once the feeds are looking right I can plug them into @ciliphw via TwitterFeed...

CILIPHW feeds: To do list

I need to improve the feeds going in to our CILIP sub-branch twitter stream (@ciliphw). At the moment there's a feed from a basic Google News search going in. It's ripped via Dapp Factory then fed in via Twitter feed. Unfortunately the search isn't brilliant and it's picking up a lot of irrelevant stuff. I thought of rss'ing a normal Google search but it's hard to pick up genuine library stories without getting stuff that mentions libraries in other contexts.

Looking at search results, I think the best option is to identify the local newspapers sites then do Google site searches. So the to do list is as follows...

1) Identify all the local papers
2) Search local papers using Google and sort results by dates
3) Get feeds of the search results (either using Google alerts or Dapp Factory)
4) Aggregate the feeds into the twitter stream using the tag #news using twitter feed.

After that I think there are a couple of other sources that might be useful to add to the Twitter stream:
1) CILIPHW news. Hopefully we should have a blog on CILIP communities soon and can take a feed from this for our events etc. #events
2) Local library blogs. #blogs
3) Local library jobs. #jobs (similar to @UKlibraryjobs but for Hants and Wight)

Hopefully, if all goes well, it will also make a good example of a simple mashup for a talk that I'm giving at work in a few weeks.