meditations on press mentions

[Jason Brooks]

I've been thinking about a process for getting press mentions from
Google Alerts into the wiki. Here are my initial thoughts on a
script/process:

I'm thinking we can do this with a script that takes the Alerts RSS
feed for a particular language (I set up a bunch at
http://venus1-jeb.rhcloud.com/), parses out date, link, title and
author (in the goog alerts rss feed, author = publication), and sends
out this info to the marketing list, formatted for cutting and pasting
into the wiki.

A member of the marketing team would then check out the links to see
that they are in fact press mentions, take note of the Author of the
piece (since the google alert doesn't include this), and paste them
into the wiki page.

It could happen once per week, and would arrive at the list looking
something like this:

Hi, for the week of $WEEK, here are the English press mentions from
Google Alerts. Please have a look at these links, and paste them into
the page at $WHERE if they look good. Take note of the Author of the
item, and include that information when you paste it into the wiki.
When you're done, please reply to this message on the list so we know
it's already handled.

|-
| Date (YYYY-MM-DD)
| [http://www.url-of-article Title of Article]
| Publication name
| AUTHOR
| ENGLISH
| Notes
|-
| Date (YYYY-MM-DD)
| [http://www.url-of-article Title of Article]
| Publication name
| AUTHOR
| ENGLISH
| Notes

***

Other thoughts:

1. I played around a bit w/ feedparser
(http://packages.python.org/feedparser/introduction.html), which
should do for writing this script.
2. It may be good to record the items harvested in a mysql db, and
dedupe them based on URL.
3. The URLs in google alerts come wrapped in google tracking stuff,
and that'll have to be removed by the script.
4. The same script could format things a bit differently and send the
mentions to the FWN list as a proto-In the News blurb, to help
automate that, as well.
5. I figure this can be hosted in openshift.
6. If we wanted, we could populate the "Notes" field with the blurb
from the rss entry.
7. Might be cool for the script to go look at the URL and try to
figure out the author, and addtl info, perhaps as a future rev
enhancement.

I'll get going on this, and as soon as I have something to look at,
I'll put it in github and send out the link.

Regards, Jason