Alexandra Samuel is the CEO of Social Signal, a Vancouver-based company that develops online communities for non-profit, government and business clients. Her recent Drupal projects include telecentre.org and NetSquared.
Keeping ahead of the news is one of the most crucial challenges for any public-facing organization, whether it's a community group striving for social change or a government agency trying to anticipate public criticism. Well-funded government and business groups -- and even large non-profits -- have enjoyed a wide and growing range of tools for tracking both conventional and new media, ranging from old-fashioned news clipping services to the latest generation of premium (and expensive) online news trackers.
But the struggling local activist group, or the thinly-stretched community organization, also have a lot at stake in effective news tracking. Catching a story below the radar and riding it into mainstream headlines can be a first step towards raising an organization's profile -- or towards getting its issues onto the public agendas. The trick is to find an affordable way of tracking the news so that an organization's staff and members can stay on top of all the latest developments.
That's become a lot easier with the advent of RSS, RSS-enabled search tools like Technorati and Google News Alerts, and free web-based RSS newsreaders like Bloglines and Pluck. To really make the most of RSS news tracking, however, an organization needs a powerful and customizable way to aggregate, annotate and republish relevant news items.
Enter Aggregator2, an add-in module for the Drupal content management system. Drupal has previously gotten some love on this site as the platform behind projects like
That feature set makes Aggregator2 an exceptionally flexible choice for setting up a nonprofit news tracker that aggregates news from a wide range of blogs, news sites and search engines. Because Aggregator2 saves each individual item as an independent node (like a web page) in Drupal, you can edit or annotate news items after you bring them onto your site. Because Aggregator2 lets you assign different tags to different incoming feeds, you can set up different news pages for different topics, and direct news to show up on the appropriate pages. And Aggregator2 is also a terrific tool for integrating content from multiple related web sites or overlapping organizations.
At Social Signal we've used Aggregator2 to help move news through the different parts of the emergent telecentre.org network. We use it to bring news and links onto our own web site, including a web page that rounds up nonprofit technology news based on the nptech tag and other search terms. And we used Aggregator2 to set up a pilot aggregation site, Confeederation, to track candidate blogs during the recent Canadian federal elections.
Even within the Drupal community, Aggregator2 is an under-appreciated resource. A lot of Drupal sites still use Drupal's out-of-the-box aggregation tool, and miss out on Aggregator2's potential for setting up powerful news tracking and innovative integration of content from multiple web sites. By offering small- and medium-sized organizations a way of creating internal or public-facing news trackers, Aggregator2 creates an opportunity to level the playing field in the ever-tough competition to get ahead of the next news cycle.
