DigiActive.org

Tool: Build Your Own Alltop For Advocacy

Background: I’m sure that many of you are familiar with Alltop. It creates destination pages for topics of interest by aggregating them on a dashboard that displays the five latest headlines from each feed. The items can be previewed by doing a rollover on the headlines and read by clicking on the headline. If you haven’t checked out Alltop yet, the Social Media, Social Entrepreneurship, Non-Profit, Good, and Human Rights pages might be a good place to start.

For some advocacy projects, it might be useful to build an Alltop-like dashboard that aggregates relevant content related to the cause on one page. So far, I had thought that it wasn’t really possible, without some serious coding.

Then, I built the Indian Election Dashboard for Vote Report India in two hours, and realized how simple it was.

Tool: The trick was to discover the wonderful OneNews theme for Wordpress, which is especially designed to build Alltop clones.

Using a special template, the theme converts a page into a collection of widgets, which can be arranged to form the dashboard. The widgets support text, photo, video and search feeds, and can also be used for entering PHP or HTML code, to add elements not built into the theme.

The theme supports an unlimited number of dashboards on a single Wordpress install, as each page can be converted into a dashboard.

So, apart from the Indian Election Dashboard I hacked together for Vote Report India, I also built a Indian Bloggers Dashboard for Global Voices (please note that Global Voices hasn’t yet endorsed the dashboard).

The theme also supports blog posts, apart from pages/ dashboards. The blog posts have a RSS feed, like a normal blog, but aren’t displayed in the usual reverse chronological order on any single page.

The theme is built on Wordpress, so almost all the features native to Wordpress, like support for multiple languages, should be available for the theme. Also, all the hacks that can be done on any Wordpress theme should also be possible here.

Here is a hack that converts the Alltop-like dashboard view to a Techmeme-like river view, using the same OneNews theme.

The OneNews theme is available for $49 for a single use license and $199 for a multiple use license. Based on my experience, it is a small investment worth making for an appropriate project.

Application: While I won’t encourage you to make a dashboard just because you can, I can see many applications for such dashboards.

The first application is to build a destination news micro-site for an important event. This is what I have done with the Indian Election Dashboard.

Another application is to aggregate content for a community or a topic of interest. This is what I have done with the Indian Bloggers Dashboard.

Yet another application will be to aggregate conversations around your advocacy project, to showcase the buzz and the impact on one page.

I would caution, however, that such dashboards might not be very useful on a standalone basis. They would work best when used as part of a bigger project, to showcase everything else you are doing on the project.

What other applications of this tool can you think of?

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.

Tool: WordPress plug-in for Kareem

Tool Description: A plug-in is a small application that functions as part of a larger host application. They are very common in blogs. For example, Akismet, the spam filter on DigiActive, is a plug-in which works through our blog platform, WordPress. Plug-ins can also be used for activism as a way of disseminating information over a blog network via a widget that a blogger installs and which produces content for the blog’s readers.

Activist Application: In February of 2007, Egyptian blogger Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman was arrested for perceived anti-Muslim postings on his blog and sentenced to three years in prison. Even since that time, a dedicated group of activists has run the Free Kareem campaign (http://www.freekareem.org), which sought first to obtain Kareem’s release and now to support him in solidarity while he is in prison. They have released a WordPress plug-in (download here) in order to maintain awareness of Kareem and to connect people to their different online efforts.

The widget (above) includes text explaining Kareem’s situation, links to the campaign on social network (Facebook, MySpace), video (YouTube) and mobile micro-blogging (Twitter) sites, and a tell-a-friend button so bloggers can ask their friends to insert the plug-in into their blog as well.

Ease of Use: Moderately easy. You need to download the plug-in and then upload it to your WordPress blog. You can also personalize the plug-in according to the features you want to show.  Installation instructions are available here.

Campaign: Brazilian bloggers vs. a WordPress ban

Description: After an unauthorized sex tape was posted on a Brazilian WordPress blog, a judicial order to shut down the blog was issued. This would mean a block on all WordPress blogs in Brazil, as they all share the same IP address.  Blocking that one IP would mean that no blogs on the WordPress platform would be accessible from within Brazil. Similar blocks have been imposed before in Brazil, and bloggers want to make sure it won’t happen again.

Digital Activism tools: blog, Orkut group, blog badge

How These Tools Are Being Used: The social networking site Orkut is extremely popular in Brazil, so an Orkut group has been formed (you need a Gmail account to access the page).   There is also an anti-ban blog, which explains the issue.  Finally, as it is an issue that affects bloggers, a blog badge has been created to oppose the potential ban.

Outcome: WordPress has not yet been blocked in Brazil, but it is too early to judge the success of the campaign.

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