It appears the Great Lakes are getting social.
The Great Lakes are getting social, whether they want to or not. Photo: NOAA GLERL
At least it does if you visit the new aggregation site, Social Great Lakes. The site has Twitter feeds lined up like stock tickers constantly in motion. They pull in tweets on news, travel, weather and sports in the Great Lakes, and then the same categories for each lake. The Twitter feeds are updated by searching entire tweets, not just hashtags.
The website is another project of news start-up, Social News Corp., based in San Francisco. The company compiles seemingly hundreds of news feeds, which all amount to scrolling Twitter posts relevant to a certain topic.
The Social Great Lakes site is just another cog in a giant aggregation wheel. A visit to Social News Corp. founder Mike Martino’s Twitter page shows dozens of links updated every few hours to newly launched Social-Fill-in-the-Blank websites, including Social Free Speech, Social Germany, Social Middle East, Social Israel, etc.
As someone who loves the Great Lakes and tolerates social media, I don’t get it. The site doesn’t organize news efficiently. With the feeds constantly scrolling, it makes me dizzy.
However, Twitter is here to stay. And with the amount of news and information pushed at us daily, Social News Corp. may be on to something.
Dear Brian Bienkowski / Great Lakes Echo
Thank you for the nice story about Social Great Lakes…
Here is an update!
Social Great Lakes now via Twitter Facebook and Google!
SAN FRANCISCO (SocialNewsCorp.) –
Social Great Lakes the Social News Magazine thats been following Social Media in and around the Great Lakes in realtime via #twitter has added the new Social Great Lakes News Page. http://SocialGreatLakes.com
Social Great Lakes will now update “twice daily” The latest on what’s happening via social media around the Great Lakes from google, facebook and twitter!
Mike Martino – SocialNewsCorp.
http://www.twitter.com/socialnewscorp
Andrew,
Wordpress has every tool to do everything.
EPA and nearly every .org I have assisted has transitioned from every other platform to wordpress for that reason…
Regardless of what your doing now “just try” under a sub domain to play with all the wordpress social tools. You will not be disappointed.
Every great social connected info site I can see on all my platforms today is based on wordpress… including this one.
Good luck with Absolute Michigan I LOVE going to the dunes!
Like the design of your site, Chris. Nice use of type. I think that the fact that your feeds aren’t moving makes it less frenetic. Still, to do what socialgreatlakes is trying to do, you have to have that scrollery.
I have been wrangling with my own site, Absolute Michigan ( http://absolutemichigan.com/ ), and trying to make the huge amounts of information there both accessible and not overly daunting. A tough challenge.
Also agree with Andrew… The real time carnival of http://www.socialgreatlakes.com of let’s chat and tweet back (endless time wasting) made me pass over it.
Some have very little time for socializing in the EHS field and just want updates of critical info. To save time and resources I blended my favorite rss and twitter feeds into a similar project (ehsnews.org) without the blaze of social media interaction.
However, I do love the idea of http://www.socialgreatlakes.com to get the social followers to involved in EHS issues.
Better than another fbook or twitter update about someones cats day (yep, I just went there).
Regardless of my views , I will follow the feed and promote this new effort to help involvement and great lakes awareness.
Thanks Brian,
Ditto to Andrew. Impressive but overwhelming to try to follow.
It’s definitely not efficient in terms of space and I’m dizzy too after not very long.
Would be a lot cooler with actual tickers I think … CNET style.