MASTERCLASSES

Tuesday 5 May 2009

Tweets from the past - could this be the future?

Archive material can provide context and lend meaning to a current event. 
At least, that’s what Keith Hopper believes, and he’s invented a way of using archive text for that purpose. It’s called NRPbackstory – NRP is America’s National Public Radio.
Here’s a post from Joshua Benton and Neiman Journalism Lab on how it works which includes this essential information:
“NPRbackstory uses Google’s Hot Trends data to determine what topics people have suddenly started searching for in large numbers. It uses NPR’s API to search the archives, then uses Yahoo Pipes to create an RSS feed that then gets cycled into the NPRbackstory Twitter account.”
 

The NPRbackstory Twitter account is here

Follow that account and you get relevant material from the archive to match current hot topics.

Here’s the inventor on how and why he did it

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