Red Pill: Shiny New Toy’s Blog

This is part 1 in a series of building an intelligence dashboard using NetVibes. 

What’s an intelligence dashboard?

An intelligence dashboard helps you keep your pulse on…well, there’s a lot of things you can keep your pulse on.  In this series, we’re going to build an intelligence dashboard to assist with monitoring Tesla Motors in various online communities and the web, in general.  There are tons of tools at your disposal to assist with tracking who is talking and writing about Tesla Motors (or another company or keyword).  Some of those tools are http://search.twitter.com (formerly Summize), Google Blog Alerts, Flickr tag search, and Technorati.  An intelligence dashboard will help bring all those sources into a single view.  So instead of having to regularly visit a number of sources, the dashboard will provide one destination that allows you to monitor a firehose of information from all across the web.

Why NetVibes?

NetVibes is a web-based swiss-army knife in many ways.  It is extremely similar to MyYahoo! or iGoogle start pages, but with a large ecoystem of widgets that extend its power.  Certainly, there are many solutions for customizable start pages and power dashboards out there, but I’m using NetFlix for its ease of customization and ability to integrate different types of content. 

I will say that iGoogle is looking more and more promising recently and it might be a tool worth checking out for these purposes.

Let’s get started

First things, first If you don’t have a NetVibes account, head over there and set one up now.

Today, we’re going to add RSS feeds to help monitor Tesla Motors in Twitter, Google Blog Search, and Technorati.  You can watch the video below to follow the steps we take to add RSS feeds of search results from each source into our dashboard.

Basically, the steps to take are:

1. Visit http://www.google.com/blogsearch, search for “Tesla Motors”, copy the link location of the RSS feed for the search results, and add that URL to your dashboard in NetVibes by selecting “Add Content”, then “Add a Feed”
2. Do the same with http://search.twitter.com .  Look for the “Feed for this Query” icon on the search results page to grab the link location.
3. And again at http://www.technorati.com .   The URL of the feed can be found behind the icon labeled “Subscribe”

Once you’ve done that, you now  have a dashboard with 3 different sources for monitoring in a single view.  Pretty easy, huh?  Tomorrow, we’ll add some rich media sources to the dashboard.

Good old handy RSS

As you’ll quickly see, we’re going to use a lot of RSS feeds in this process.  I’m sure you’re pretty familiar with RSS, but If you aren’t check out this video by CommonCraft.