URL: bbc.co.uk/worldservice/talkingamerica

Excitingly, not long after we built the award-winning Bangladesh River Journey mini-site for the BBC World Service, we were asked for another helping of social media expertise.

What is it?

Talking America is a trail-blazing social media campaign that we’re proud to have worked on. This time, it’s a live site that tracks the World Service crew as they journey across America in a social media bus.

Their big aim? In the eloquent words of Ros Atkins:

“This bus trip is our attempt to paint a detailed picture of America ahead of the election in November. We also want to create conversations between Americans and everyone else…”

(Ros Atkins, BBC crew member on the Talking America bus).

What you can do with social media

Talking America uses maps, pictures, video, audio podcasts, blog posts and other user-generated snippets to bring a journey alive. In this case, we built a mini content-management system for the journalists, with a system to pull in the latest Flickr photos from the bus and a colourful map to display it all.

In charming technological terms, we call it a “geo-mashup.” Namely, a smooth way of automatically pulling together time and location-based information into one online multimedia bundle. The outcome of this is the ability to track the reporters over time and in different contexts.

A bit for the technically brained

The mapping application uses jQuery and Sumo, which is a JavaScript microformats parser written by Dan Webb, who also worked on the front-end of the site. If you look at the site without JavaScript, you’ll see that all the info is already present on the page, written up in microformats and ready to be plotted on the map.

And they’re off…

URL: dharmafly.com/crunchies

Planet what?

‘Planet‘ sites are a new and wonderful way to draw people with common interests together online… and today is the day we get to demonstrate how.

What’s all this green stuff?

This weekend, at Barcamp Brighton3, we’re giving Brighton’s best New Media pros some special treats, in the form of Dharmafly Crunchies; little boxes of spirulina (it’s like a tiny green seaweed), known for being a potent superfood.

The fancy boxes were designed along with the brilliant minds of John Cooper (Kapow.me) and Ellen de Vries.

Why?

We’re hoping that spirulina’s special powers will entice these social media buffs to go online and post tweets, blogs, photos and videos of themselves ‘doing stuff’ with their Dharmafly Crunchies.

What’s happening on Planet Crunchy right now? Take a look.

So what’s a Planet for?

A ‘Planet‘ site can draw people together online under one coherent, enthusiastic umbrella. So they’re particularly effective tools for social media campaigns where you want to get people discussing a hot topic, and find out who’s talking about you.

Lifestreams are another great use for Planet technologies. They can be used to round up all your online and offline activities to keep and share them in one place.

A Planet site for you?

If you want to find out more about using Planets for campaigns, for you as an individual, or you want to be involved in building one, get in contact and we can give you lots of enthusiastic help.

What’s under the bonnet?

It looks like magic, but in fact it uses a whole host of web technologies. It takes in RSS feeds from Technorati, Google blog search and a load of social networking and news sites, passes them through Yahoo Pipes and SimplePie and finally into WordPress, along with a smattering of jQuery, combining them together into one seamless package.

This weekend is BarcampBrighton2, a grassroots technology conference organised and run by the participants. Over the last couple of days, we’ve been piecing together a special Greasemonkey userscript for the conference, which enables Yahoo Live users to broadcast live video as a group. We call it YLiveGroups.

» Install the script

We first used Yahoo Live at last month’s SemanticCampLondon and there was a great buzz of conversation from people who were watching from other countries, discussing the topics of the talks, asking questions and learning about the subjects.

For BarcampBrighton2, we’ll help people get broadcasting and we’ll use YLiveGroups to bring them all together. Viewers from around the world will be able to tune in and keep track of the many talks taking place.

Yahoo Live

Yahoo Live is an interesting new experiment. It makes it possible for anyone to create their own live video channel, available to anyone who cares to watch. As has been pointed out before, there is plenty of scope to increase its potential for social networking. YLiveGroups is our attempt to do just that with some rudimentary group functionality.

YLiveGroups

To use YLiveGroups, you will need to use the Firefox web browser, along with the Greasemonkey add-on. Then, install YLiveGroups and head on over to Yahoo Live.

At the moment, the only group available is BarcampBrighton2. However, we intend to develop the code so that anyone can create their own group. These groups could be used to tie broadcasts together at events, connect people around a single topic or simply bring together a group of friends.

Techie Details

In case you were wondering…

The userscript interacts with both the Yahoo Live API and our own simple YLiveGroups API. Our API uses XOXO microformat HTML documents to exchange data (as opposed to standard XML or JSON). The script then uses JQuery to interract with the XOXO documents and the web page that the user is currently viewing. Premasagar will be talking more about this in his presentation at Barcamp.

We’d love to work with other developers to take this project forward. If you’d like to get involved, or have any feedback at all, then please leave a comment here.