Let’s further expand the Tesla Motors Intelligence Dashboard by tracking some interesting key phrases that Tesla might be interested in. These might include:

• Green technology
• Electric cars
• renewable energy

You should know what to do now.  Add a tab in NetVibes for “Green technology” then add RSS feeds of search results.  If you want to filter that list, send through PostRank before adding the feed to the dashboard.

By the way, another good source of information is Google News.  Not surprisingly, they provide RSS feeds of their search results. 

I’d rather not launch into a tutorial on using Pipes (that’s a whole series of blog posts in itself), but here’s a few links for you to check and learn more about using Yahoo! Pipes

• 5 Minute Intro to Yahoo! Pipes – Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Introduction to Yahoo! Pipes – Mr. Speaker
• Yahoo! Pipes and the Web As Database – ReadWriteWeb
• Start Data Plumbing with Yahoo! Pipes – Webmonkey
• Pipes: A Tool for Remixing the Web (Video)
• Pipes Tutorial (YouTube Video)

But back to building our intelligence dashboard.  Where does Yahoo Pipes come into play?  It already came into play yesterday when we added a YouTube tag watcher for Tesla Motors.  Today, I’m going to add a monitoring tool for watching submissions to crowdsourced content engines like Digg and Reddit by using a previously made Pipe called Social Site Submission Watch Dog.  Head over there, insert teslamotors.com into the URL field for the pipe and click Run Pipe.  As we did n the previous post in this series, we grab the RSS results of the pipe and add the feed to our NetVibes dashboard.

The result looks like the image below.  The Social Site Submission feed is in the top of the third column.

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:

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.

Rather than spend a lot of time on the mechanics of building your own intelligence dashboard during the breakout session, I promised that I would write a blog post about that process.  So next week, I’m going to start a series of posts that will take you through the process of building your own intelligence dashboard to facilitate the stage of listening to the online conversations already taking place.

The dashboard I’ll be building heavily leverages RSS technology.  If you aren’t familiar with what RSS, the great folks at Common Craft have a wonderful video to help explain it.