My organization, jerseyarts.com, is a nonprofit program cosponsored by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and ArtsPride NJ. Our mission is generally to increase the awareness and participation in the arts in NJ, more specifically to make it easier for the field to get their message to the people of NJ.
I just got hired as the Marketing and Communication Associate mostly I think because of my history of following the nptech conversation over the years and trying my best to stay ahead of the curve. Alas, I feel as if I am falling behind. The internet age seemingly makes young people old before their time.
My idea for my organization is to make all our changing content into feeds, including our calendar, youtube, flickr, facebook, myspace, delicious, etc...and aggregate those feeds into one service, perhaps including some partners in that feed. Is friendfeed the answer? Could it be? Or are there other options out there, more customization available, less 'friend' feed and more 'cause' feed?
Thanks for your time.
Karin Jervert
JerseryArts.com
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Comments
tagging and pipes a more likely answer
I'm questioning whether people want to see ALL of your changes and output. If they do, I think that yahoo pipes, a service that will deliver the content in THEIR preferred output (reader, email, etc) rather than an aggregator that YOU choose (such as friendfeed) and they then need to sign up for, would be the way to accomplish this. However, I think each of the services you mention draw specific audiences, and those that have facebook and flickr accounts but not the others probably don't have the others for a reason. That said, I've found friendfeed to be very useful personally, but have not used it professionally yet.
Tagging
Hey, thanks for the comment. I have thought about creating a tag like nptech, but jerseyarts. Am I right in thinking that we could just tag all our content with the jerseyarts tag and then people would search that tag on different platforms like flickr, youtube, etc. and find our content plus the content of others who have tagged their content jerseyarts?
How exactly does tagging work?
I haven't checked out yahoo pipes yet, but will give it a look.
Re: Tagging
Yes, if you use a consistent tag that definitely makes it easier for people to find all your content and to write services that will pull content out. For example, for an arts festival I help out with we ask people to tag all the content they produce around the festival with 'greenbeltXX' (where XX is the year, so greenbelt2008 this year). We also make sure we tag our official outputs that way and that then lets us (or others) filter our own content on flickr but also to gather together all relevant content.
Here are our official photos for this year: http://flickr.com/photos/greenbelt/tags/greenbelt2008
and then there are all the photos from this year: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/greenbelt2008/
You'll then also find that there are sites that gather together content with a specific tag across multiple sites. Technorati is a good example of that:
http://technorati.com/tag/greenbelt2008
What can become tricky is distinguishing between official and unofficial content for your tag when gathering the data off many sites (there's no easy way for someone to filter the technorati results for greenbelt2008 to only find content we produced centrally). Where I find tags particularly helpful is to help a wide audience contribute content related to a topic or event.
If you want to make sure people can access your official data, it's probably best to start by making sure the various feeds you offer are clearly advertised. It's definitely a good idea to have a page on your site pointing to your flickr page, your twitter, your delicious account, your youtube, etc, and probably to use a consistent username across all of them so that people can easily guess at the URL to find your content.
friendfeed is a nice way to pull all your content together, but it's not very mainstream and it's not at all clear whether it will become mainstream. If you have the time I'd be inclined to set up a profile and measure what happens. People can always turn off updates from services they don't want to see.