james cooke blog

Who Is Banksy? - Tumblr as a feed aggregation platform

A UK street artist called Banksy has been pushing himself hard over the last couple of weeks - there’s been lots of talk about him on blogs and twitter. Plus making it into the traditional press in the last week with exclusives in The Times and Time Out London, all in the run up to the release of his film yesterday.

What is “Who is Banksy”?

We wanted to create a Banksy resource quickly and efficiently to collect Banksy info from around the web and collate it in one place. “Who is Banksy?” is a site that we created in an afternoon to explore how quick and easy it is to create an aggregation site with tumblr - the answer - “very quick and very easy!”

How?

We decided to use tumblr because it is excellent at handling different types of content and has automatic importing functions for up to five feeds.

1. Create a new tumblelog.
2. Get your feeds in straight away. They can take hours to get processed by tumblr servers so add them first. Click customize > services > “Automatically import my…” and add your feeds.
3. Make all your customisations, edit title, descriptions, etc.
4. Choose your template and customise it. We went for chunky.
5. We recommend that you add disqus and analytics.
6. Wait for your content to pour in.

What about lifestream?

What we’ve done on this mini-project would also work for someone creating their own lifestream - it would collect information from your own streams.

What about if I’ve got more than five sources?

Tumblr will currently only import five feeds for you. If you need more, you can use Yahoo! pipes to aggregate your similar feeds into one and then add them to tumblr.

Current issues - stuff we’d like to improve:

• We’re well aware that a blog with no human interaction isn’t a blog, so we’re working on keeping an eye on the imported posts, adding Banksy items we find that are not in the feeds and commenting on things we love.
• We’re looking for a good way to include tweets about Banksy, but there is such a high volume that if we did it as a feed it would swamp other content.

Wish list - things we wish we could do with Tumblr:

• Follow and like posts with all tumblelogs in your Tumblr account, not just the main one.
• Add tags to items that are imported from feeds.
• See the imported feed URL in the customisation panel for each tumblelog. It would also be great if items from feeds could be given the creation date as they are in the fee so that they are woven together in the tumblelog. Currently, tumblr dumps a bunch from one feed, then the next feed and so on.
• Although tumblarity was making tumblelogs compete against each other, there were some useful metrics in the tumblarity page - could we have some back please. Number of reblogs, number of likes and info on most popular posts?

We also wish that we could get feeds from Flickr groups and filter them based on the photo license - ideally we would only pull in CC content. But for now everything is going up!

That’s all! Have fun with tumblr and feeds!