Tweet, tweet it's the latest Dunedin news

I’ve just initiated a small experiment (of sorts) on Twitter.

I have setup a new account called DunedinNews to provide links to the latest news stories, musical happenings, events, and University news releases as they relate to Dunedin. The aim here is to see if an aggregated news service about Dunedin is useful to anyone and whether or not Twitter streams are a good place to present this kind of information.

This may sound like a lot of work but in reality it isn’t.

DunedinNews is simply a destination for a collection of automated RSS feeds from a variety of sources. This means that now its setup, it no longer requires manual intervention and will tweet away the latest news, events, music, University happenings at specified intervals.

To do this, I use the excellent (and free) service TwitterFeed to create and manage a series of RSS feeds. These feeds are then targetted at specific Twitter accounts (in this case DunedinNews) and checked hourly (up to a maximum of 24 hours where quick updates are unlikely). Note, however, that TwitterFeed currently has a very slow interface - which seems appropriate somehow (;->).

At the moment five separate sources are being used: Otago Daily Times Dunedin feed, EventFinder Dunedin feed, Dunedinmusic.com feed, Topix.com Dunedin feed, and the University of Otago news feed. I initially tried Google news filtered to Dunedin only news but mysteriously the RSS feed could not be parsed by the TwitterFeed service. I note that the Dunedin City Council Website intends on having RSS feeds sometime soon - so I’ll add that as well.

But in the meantime, if you are a Twitterer (or Twit even) follow DunedinNews and let me know what you think right here.