Google news api and creating alerts programmatically

[campgurus]

I think we were discussing how we get info for updating cases recently. Our current manual process is proving unsustainable. What we do now:

• After entering a case (@article), we manually create a Google alert with the key words "[@article.title][@article.subject.age][@article.city][@article.state]"

• Periodically, one person reviews the email account receiving updates to find relevant info

• Once info is found it is added to the appropriate case along with a link to the news article.

Right now, these steps are not happening on a regular basis.

The first part of the process would seem to be automatable. i.e., when a case is created, the alert should automatically be created in Google alerts. I found this gem which might help: https://github.com/pivotus/galerts.

For the second and third elements of our process, I think our ultimate solution could be to use the gem to pull in results from the google news alerts based on our keywords (eg for the past week) to a page on ebwiki.org. Then users could update the cases with relevant information without having to access email or do their own searches. We could provide a list of articles related to ebwiki cases and users would have easy access to spend a minute updating a case with info from the page.

Alternatively, we could pull the news alert on the fly via a link on the Case page such that a user can link directly from @case.show to a list of recent news articles from which they can pull updates.

The easier we make this process, the more success we will have getting these cases updated regularly.

[rlgreen91]

From what I recall, one thing we wanted to do was to encourage users to perform this: to find a way to create Google alerts for them based on the user's email address. We also wanted to encourage users to do that early on - hey, you're following the case, why don't you go ahead and set up a Google alert type of thing, for example.

[campgurus]

I think the ultimate goal is to have our users updating content on the site wikipedia style. There are any number of ways for them to perform gather that info. Encouraging them to set up Google alerts is on one end of the spectrum. So far, we have had very few users who have editing multiple cases. My suggestion is to get people to do what we need, we could make it even easier for them to get the information that they can use to edit the cases. The gem seemed to provide an avenue to do that.

By the way, Google News is convenient, but only one source. There are likely other sources and methods of info retrieval we could add over time, eg encouraging eyewitnesses to contribute directly.

[campgurus]

Here is another tool that might help us get content programmatically.

https://github.com/Webhose/webhoseio-ruby

Right now, I think I am the main person updating cases on the site. Steven Berry adds new cases and links to existing cases from time to time. Obviously having only 2 people updating content on thousands of cases is not a sustainable situation.

[rlgreen91]

That doesn't really explain much. Do you mean that we use that to search sites? A lot of resources we use may expose an API - it would be better to use that.

Personally, I prefer for us to focus more on encouraging users to add and update content for right now. Yes, there are plenty of databases out there that we should look for, but to me this is a wiki - we should do everything we can to get users contributing first.

[campgurus]

Updating this issue to capture a discussion @rlgreen91 and I had months ago about the following potential 2-pronged solution:

• Users can click a button on the case page to create a google alert using @case and the @user.email

• EBWiki creates a page for each case that includes an up to date list of news article links from Google News along with a tutorial on how to use the information to update the case

[campgurus]

Not sure where it falls on the list, but I still think this is a reasonable approach to making it easier for users to find info and update cases.