Yes, you too can write for The Washington Post, and for The Guardian in the UK. For their web sites, that is. For an itsy-bitsy rectangle within their web sites, that is. All you have to do is register for a different web site, then add your feeds to include your content, which will appear in a widget. Somewhere. That’s clear and simple, right?
Here’s the widget, and you can get the code for it here:
Consider yourself deputized. Socialmedian founder/CEO Jason Goldberg says both newspapers will be dumping political posts/tweets/bleeps aggregated from the blogotwittersphere into a handy-dandy-teeny Election Talk widget from socialmedian, a next-gen Digg/bookmark aggregation startup I’ve been watching this year. I wish I could explain socialmedian – I’ve played with it and still can’t figure out how to use it. OK, maybe I’ve figured out how, I just don’t enjoy it. You register, then add content in various ways or follow topic channels with content from other people. Either way, you wind up with a screen full of links and excerpts that makes you wish your head would explode to spare your eyes from having to look again.
I get the widget. Pop it into any web site – yours, mine, The Washington Post, The Guardian. Whatever. Goldberg explained it in an email I received Tuesday: “The site aggregates news and user-feeds related to the election and enables users to join in the election coverage and discussion. We created this site with The Washington Post to enable people to track all the election news from thousands of news sources as well as from Twitter feeds, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and more all in one place, and (importantly) to join-in and add their own feeds from their favorite sites to provide user reports leading up to and on election day.”
Here’s what The Post forgot to mention in it’s “new and cool” explanation of the widget: the Post is an investor in socialmedian. The Post could ingest and spew out political RSS feeds and tweets any number of ways. They’ve got a stake in this one. Also worth noting/watching: Caroline Little, formerly CEO of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, has been consulting for The Guardian in the UK to help it expand its US audience. The Post-Guardian connection may be a mere coincidence. Or worth watching.
