How we could syndicate eParticipation related resources really simple

Most of you are familiar with the concept of RSS-Feeds, which enable you to collect/check new content of different websites without visiting them.

All you have to do is to put the feed’s web address (URL) in your feed reader. There are lots of different RSS reader available either as plug-in for your browser (Firefox, MS Explorer etc.) or web based like e.g. google reader.

Beyond the readers there are lots of different feed aggregators, allowing you to display and remix different RSS feeds on one or more screens. One example is netvibes. Other services allow you to build a community around the feeds, where members can additionally rate the feeds, comment on it, or post messages, like e.g. friendfeed.

In the following I would like to propose how we could make use of all of this  to better share different eParticipation related resources among the PEP-NET members.

Let’s start with social bookmarking. If you find some information on the web valuable, you usually set a bookmark to be able to visit the site later with out learning the address by heart.

Instead of bookmarking the site in your browser you may use a social bookmarking tool like delicious. The advantage is not only that your bookmarks will be available from any computer with a Internet connection, but they are, if you want, also visible for other users. To enable anybody to find bookmarks for a specific topic, all users can assign tags to it.

Going one step further, you can create a network on delicious and add other users it.  For this network  all of the stuff the members have bookmarked will now be displayed in chronological order.

I did this for PEP-NET and you can see the result here: delicious.com/network/PEPNET. If you already have a delicious account, please sent me your user name and I will add you to the network.

This collection of bookmarks is available as RSS Feed at the same time. That enables us to integrate it into some of the afore mentioned aggregator sites. Let’s start with friendfeed. I have created a room, which all of you could join when you have registered. Here I fed in the delicious bookmarks and mixed them with other relevant sources such as ePartcipation weblogs.

As you will see there is also a lot of content which is not really on topic. One way to highlight the relevant parts of the stream is to comment on some of the links or to click on the “Like” button. And of course you can at any time post messages, links or photos to enrich this resource.

Another way to refine the content is to filter the feeds before they will be displayed at friendeed to just let links show up which are tagged with keywords like eParticipation or eDemocracy. This can be done with yahoo pipes – we are working on it.

There are a lot more possibilities to make use of the social web for PEP-NET and I will introduce some in another post. But maybe we can start with social bookmarking and friendfeed. Here is what you should do:

1. Get registered on delicious
2. drop me a note about your username (info (at) pep-net.eu)
3. Get registered at friendfeed
4. Join the room: friendfeed.com/rooms/pepnet
5. Share your resources, opinions, likes and dislikes

Comments are very welcome.

Tags: friendfeed, RSS, social web