Red Pill: Shiny New Toy’s Blog

In the previous post, I started things by adding some basic monitoring feeds from Google Blog Search, Twitter, and Technorati to the NetVibes intelligence dashboard I’m building to monitor Tesla Motors around the web. The result looked like this.

Before I forget, I should mention that you can see the work in progress by going to http://www.netvibes.com/shinynewtoy

The next step is to add some rich media results to this, by grabbing tag search results from Flickr and YouTube. In addition to providing monitoring information, this will also help make the dashboard more visual appealing and engaging – potentially paying dividends down the road when sharing the dashboard with executives a little less familiar with social media tools and web monitoring.

Let’s work on adding Flickr first.

Go to Flickr.com and search tags only for “Tesla Motors”.  Now there’s no RSS feed link for these search results, but you can use the NetVibes Flickr widget to insert the images into the dashboard. 

You’ll then go to NetVibes and..

1. Click Add Content
2. in the search box in the Add Content drop down, search for Flickr
3. Add the Flickr module to the dashbard
4. Edit the Flickr Module and type in “Tesla Motors” in the Tag field
5. Change the layout to Thumbnails
6. Choose Open Pictures to “Full Resolution”
7. Click OK

Now onto YouTube

This is going to utilize Yahoo Pipes.  (More on what pipes is in a future post)  Specifically, this pipe that converts a results of a YouTube tag and converts it into an RSS Feed.    Once you’re there, insert “Tesla Motors” into the tag field and click run pipe.  The results will give you an option to grab it an RSS feed.  Just like adding RSS feeds of Twitter search results, we need to copy the link location of the URL and add it to NetVibes.

After a little rearranging of the NetVibes modules, our dashboard now looks like this: