Updated the big feed and observations about politician's websites
I spent a bit of time with the Surrey Yahoo Pipe agglomeration. Tested the feeds. Adjusted a few. The news alerts feed works pretty good now. I added the Sun and Province back in, or more precisely stopped blocking them. I'm also trying a filter on identical addresses to prevent duplicates.
Then I went back and (using my page on politician contacts of course!) retried getting rss feeds off the Surrey MPs and MLAs. More success this time around! A few sites looked like they've been updated. The successful feeds were added to the rss reader for monitoring and into the Yahoo pipe.
I still find it astonishing that organizations -- and I'll include politicians in with that group -- don't have rss enabled on their sites. It seems so obvious, especially if you're looking for reposting or dissemination of texts. There's a PR failure there, and possibly a media failure in not trying to incorporate that technology or pushing for it.
On the positive side, most of the politicians now have email newsletters. The NDP ones give options for both their representatives and the party. The Liberals, alas, seem to only have one for the party or caucus as they call it. I signed up for a few and will share them via Twitter, as I've been doing for MLA Cadieux, who I think was the first out of the gate.
And speaking of PR, you'd think the politicians would be all over creating unique content for their constituency -- content that they'd try to get everyone to share. That doesn't seem to be the case, at least for all of them.
Next up for the news monitoring service: I should try to do the same pipe project for the Langleys.
