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.

Well, this one didn’t get blogged yet… Back in June, we stayed up all night at the BBC / Yahoo Hack Day in London. The task was to combine data sources and build something experimental – and a little bit edgy.

We forged a script to enhance mainstream news sites (such as BBC News) with a layer of grassroots community content – from bloggers, photographers, and the like. The idea was to propagate the news and views from the streets, alongside mainstream media. The result: ‘HackHUD‘.

It’s a Greasemonkey userscript and it uses a number of Yahooey things (Pipes, YUI and Term Extraction), to display content from Flickr, Technorati and Newsvine.

We were clackety-clack on the keyboard, non-stop for over 24 hours. There were tears and laughter… and in the end, a prize.

» The HackHUD Project
» Install the script (quickly, before the BBC redesign their site ;)

Changelog

• 0.16 – Public release.
• 0.17 – Problem with Flickr photos fixed.
• 0.181 – Wikipedia and Twitter options added.
• 0.2 – Updated to accommodate changes to BBC site & to Greasemonkey.
• 0.21 – Better handling of multi-word tags.