Last year I started the NYT Anonymity Project, where I used Yahoo My Web 2.0 to tag and copy/ paste "because clauses"– the printed reasons why article sources were granted anonymity.
The system was flawed because it wasn’t automated– I had to do run a search for the word(s), click to the story, and copy/paste the phrase into my My Web account. I stopped doing it.
With Yahoo! Pipes, so far I’ve automated two of the three tasks. Here’s what I did:
- Created a feed from Google News that searches for the word "anonymity" from the NYT
- Created one for the phrase "to be identified"
- Created a Yahoo Pipe that fetches these two feeds, joins them together, and flows them here
The feed pulls the headline and the text that surrounds the searched-for phrase. That means no more searching and no more copy/ pasting.
Next up: figure out a way to strip out all of the other item description text besides the "because clause". I think I have to use the regex (regular expressions) in Pipes to pick up the string after the searched-for phrase and before the next period or comma in the string.