mediaczar

Marshall Kirkpatrick has published an excellent process for getting up to speed with what the big issues are in your market sector. Is there, he asks:

any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the “Google and wander” method?

He then outlines an almost perfect example of how to use social media to do this.

You should read his article before reading any further. It’s short and punchy and won’t take much time.

Read it? Good. Now you may have noticed in the comments section that the first commenter doubts that you can:

find one baker or candlestick maker that will go through all of that.

So I thought I’d see if I can automate the process. The short answer is that I can and I can’t. I can’t yet automate one or two really important bits and pieces, notably:

1. ranking delicious bookmarks by popularity, not recency
2. human editorial selection of bookmarks

Perhaps someone could help me with this.
But otherwise, I’ve published this Yahoo! Pipe, Automating Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Social Media Cheatsheet Process which automates 90% of the process, and may make it easier for the bakers and candlestickmakers.

All comments and — more importantly — suggestions and improvements gratefully received.

Monday, 12 Jan 2009 00:27: I’ve just added a bit to the pipe to list posts in descending order according to PostRank. Don’t know if this is useful

Over the holidays, I started playing with a new Yahoo! pipe to pull information from Technorati into a spreadsheet. The reasons why I wanted to do this are covered in this post about the quantitative analysis of blogs, and my eventual perl-based solution to the problem is covered in this post.

The problem with the perl-based approach is that it’s a little inaccessible to people who aren’t comfortable using a command line environment. So I really wanted to make something that more people would feel comfortable using, and perhaps play around with.

So, with some help and kind words from Bob Briski, one of whose pipes I’d stumbled across and bookmarked during my research for this project, I decided to finish off the pipe and publish it so that others could use it, or (better still) improve upon it.
Continue reading ‘The Technorati Authority Yahoo! Pipe’