Announcing: Plings on the tele!

We are pleased to announce that Plings in Stockport can now be found via digital television.  Working with our partners DigiTV, we have developed a plug-in that enables people to list activities from the comfort of their own armchair.

At the moment the plug-in will list activities taking place within Stockport for that day, and then provide further details.  As with the website, only activities taking place in the future are listed.

We intend to improve the whole scope and functionality of the plug-in in the next months, as part of the DCSF Information & Signposting project.  Any local authority that subscribes to the DigiTV service will be able to utilise the plug-in, which reads in data in XML.  People can access the service via the Sky or Virgin platform by accessing Looking Local which contains the plug-in service as follows:

1. Press the Interactive button on your remote
2. Select SKY Active from the menu
3. Select Services
4. Select Looking Local

1. Press Interactive
2. Select News and Info
3. Select Looking Local

Once there (its not that many clicks, honest!) then go to ’Live It’, then ‘Young People’… and then ‘Plings – Stockport’!

(Update: 27th Nov – actually it’s less clicks than we originally thought. Page updated with the new clicks list.)

Screenshots:

Listings of activities on digital television

One of the details pages

Expanding the view

We’ve made some more changes over at the http://stockport.plings.net today.

After a couple of weeks of testing we’re going live with the following features:

7 days of activity – although there is a google calendar, we’ve added a full 7 days of data to the regular interface allowing you to browse by day.

To aid you in your browsing around we’ve added a tag cloud of the weeks activities, and an option to filter your ‘Places to Go’ by postcode as well as the existing ‘ward’ filter.

When you ask for more information about an activity you can now see photo’s from the Plings Flickr group (if they exists) of the venue.

The API makes all sorts of RSS feeds available to people, and we’ve added 2 to the site:

• a feed of the next 2 days activities
• a seven day feed of activities at any venue

We’ve also made a few behind the scenes changes that should make browsing the site faster.

Manchester Plings will be getting the same treatment in a few days. If you want to have a look at the code to see what we’re doing, then you can. The project is hosted at https://launchpad.net/webplings

Plings by Tweet

The great thing about Plings is that really it’s just a load of data – and because we’re happy to share, you can do what you want with it.

Twitter is a way of telling people what you are doing right now. We wondered if we could use it to tell us that a Pling was about to start….

First we set up an account at Twitter for Stockport: http://twitter.com/skplings

Using the Plings API, we went and grabbed the Stockport Plings RSS feed for today. (http://feeds.plings.net/xml.activity.php/0/la/00BS)

Next we head over to Yahoo Pipes! to strip our feed down. We only want activities that start in the next hour in our twitter feed, otherwise it will read our day feed and tweet them all at once. You can see then pipe we made at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/plings/skplingsooon (You can make a copy of this pipe for yourself and put your own feed in, including those from the API)

So, so now we have an RSS feed that only shows activities that start (more or less) in the next hour – how do we get this into Twitter?

Twitterfeed.com allows you to do just that. We created another account there and popped in the details of the feed, and for our Twitter account.

Within minutes, the two were talking and Tweets started to come through.

I went and got myself Twitterfox to plug in to my Firefox web browser, and now I’m notified just before activities are about to start.

Same data – different way of getting it!

People Powered Plings!

I really like the new (beta) BBC topics service. Choose from the ever growing list of topics and the BBC will magically arrange content from several places and sources into one page:

This reminds me of the work we are doing with Plings at the moment, evident in the Stockport page we have up live. This page is not static, but calls several data and feed sources to generate the content at one go. So – currently we are calling Events held in Plings, Images in Flickr, News in the Pligg (via Google Reader and Yahoo Pipes), Volunteering Opportunities in Do-It, Podcasts in Radiowaves, Bookmarks in Del.icio.us and even census data from a text file!

We also worked on a way to dynamically switch between Manchester and Stockport – which we will put out soon. This calls in new feeds, but in the same parameters. David did us proud with that!

Whilst that sounds great, there are two underlying issues around this:

1. Reliance on external web services and sources
2. Keeping data and feeds up to date

The first point is typical of where we are at now. A few years ago, we may have tried to build our own Flickr, Deli.cio.us and Digg for example – but why bother?

The second point is more interesting though. This reminds me of the growth in People Powered Search Engines that are now around – including the terrific Mahalo (which I always miss-spll btw!). Mahalo works in the same aggregation-led way but the content that is put together is usually contributed by people:

Each page seems to have a manager, with contributions made by various people. This is like wikipedia, but not like it – as the content that is generated on a page can change according to the feeds and time of day, etc.

It strikes me that building a similar People Powered Search Engine could be an answer to the Places to Go, Things to Do issue (and perhaps other youth work related topics, but we have to stay focussed here). We have a clear idea as to the trusted sources and places where content might be – the next step is to get people to find, tag and flag it… no mean task, but certainly one that is achievable.

Go Go Google Calendar

Good news. Stockport MBC have published the Plings from Stockport Youth Service as a Google Calendar on their website:

This reads the Plings iCal feed, and publishes it. People can easily share activity info, and even add it to their own google calendar. Once there, Google can even send SMS reminders!

We now have a vast array of formats that Plings info is available in, iCal being the latest. Armed with the data in these formats, very interesting, flexible and engaging tools can be put together – quickly and easily.