Global News Content Module - Stories, Photos, Quotes, Connections

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vineet-gdo's picture

Moved to official ideas list: http://drupal.org/node/237907

I want to propose a project for building a module that pulls news content from a global news service called Daylife (http://daylife.com)

Daylife is a global news aggregation service that offers an Open API platform called DayPI (http://developer.daylife.com) for any developer, blogger, news service to pull stories and photos about any topic in the world. The API returns data in XML, JSON and PHP serialized formats. You can read the Daylife About page at http://www.daylife.com/page/about to learn more about the company. All platform documentation is on http://developer.daylife.com/docs

Goals

The primary goal for such a module would be to talk to the DayPIs and help the site owners to:

Pull data by calling Daylife APIs

a) Pull stories related to a topic (e.g. http://www.daylife.com/topic/Barack_Obama/articles/today/date/1)

b) Pull images related to a topic (e.g. http://www.daylife.com/topic/Barack_Obama/photos/today/1)

c) Pull quotes related to a topic (e.g. http://www.daylife.com/topic/Barack_Obama/quotes/today/1)

d) Pull connections related to a topic. Connections are basically topics related to a given topic (e.g. http://www.daylife.com/topic/Barack_Obama/players/today)

Help build blocks and pages using the data pulled from the DayPI

i) Build a block with list of stories, photos, quotes or connections about a topic

ii) Build a topic pages which is a combination of data pulled in a, b, c and d above (e.g. http://www.daylife.com/topic/Barack_Obama)

iii) Provide admin interfaces to configure what is pulled from the Daylife API for each block.

Example Usage Scenarios for this module are:

a) I have a fashion blog and I want to put fashion news and fashion photos in a news section (full page) or in the right nav.

b) I blog about NBA teams and players. I want to build full pages of these teams and players with stories, photos, connections and quotes.

c) I want to put a news ticker about pharmaceutical news on my pharma blog. I will get the news by having a query that hits the Daylife Search APIs and gets a list of headlines.

d) I see my blog or site is indexed by Daylife. I want to enable site search on my site using the Daylife APIs.

I am cross posting this project proposal across the groups Knight Foundation, Newspapers on Drupal, RSS & Aggregation, Soc 2008.

I believe this module can help Drupal site owners put global news using this module in easy configurable manner.

Vineet Gupta
http://developer.daylife.com
emailto:vineet-at-daylife-dot-com

Comments

Notes

agentrickard's picture

Vineet and I chatted about this some the other day. It could be an interesting project. As described right now, it may be too large for a single SoC project.

@Vineet -- the security system will not allow for the attachment of .doc files. Try a .pdf or plain text.

--
http://ken.therickards.com/
http://savannahnow.com/user/2
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PDF Document Attached

vineet-gdo's picture

Thanks Ken.

I have now attached a PDF for the requirements document.

Also, I would be glad to cut down the requirements if any one would be interested in implementing this module as a SoC project. Esp., the requirements for a data store can be taken away. With properly implemented caching, the module can still work without hassles. You do loose the editorial control on what data from the DayPI shows up on your site by not having a data store.

-- Vineet

Split projects

agentrickard's picture

It may also be possible to split 2 or 3 projects from one base -- however, then you may have issues with coordination to prevent duplication of effort.

--
http://ken.therickards.com/
http://savannahnow.com/user/2
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webchick's picture

...and we can always identify further areas where things could be expanded in case the student gets done early.

So what's the "base" level of functionality that would need to be implemented for this project to be a success, and what are a couple of ways that it could be improved?

Interested as a student

sumitk's picture

Well I think this is a nice idea. Such thing was in my mind from a long time.
I think Vineet Yahoo's term extractor api could be used here very well for setting page according to a topic(this process could be automated using that).
Well a i think it is really over ambitious for GSOC.
sumit kataria
mail: pec.sumit@gmail.com

Module exists

agentrickard's picture

I think the Yahoo's term extractor api module already exists as a project, but do not recall the name.

--
http://ken.therickards.com/
http://savannahnow.com/user/2
http://blufftontoday.com/user/3

Yahoo Terms:

Calais

vineet-gdo's picture

Alex,

Have you worked with Open Calais? Are there modules already talking to Calais and are there any apps using them?

-- Vineet

Calais module

gdd's picture

I actually just contacted the Calais module maintainer yesterday because I was considering proposing Calais API integration as a Summer Of Code project in and of itself. He is in active development and hoping to release code soon, so I gave up that idea. However there is no code released yet either.

Re-scoping

vineet-gdo's picture

Thanks for the comments everyone. I am working on rescoping this project and should have this edited by end of day tomorrow Wed March 19th

Project Proposal rescoped for GSoC

vineet-gdo's picture

I have updated the project proposal for being a Google Summer of Code project. I have taken out my previous specifications for having a data store and maintaining it.

This project has a great potential of providing an inventory of content to the drupal site owners from sources around the world about topics of interest.

-- Vineet Gupta
Cool stuff - http://labs.daylife.com
Recipes - http://cookbook.daylife.com
DayPIs - http://developer.daylife.com

Hello All, I am a computer

sumitk's picture

Hello All,

I am a computer science student from India. I would want to do this project as part of Google Summer of code program because I see this project a great opportunity for drupal sites to pull a vast inventory of content from news sources. The level and amount of data on web has increased tremendously and it is hard to dig through this data and editorially manage a site. Most of the times, it is not possible to update our websites accordingly, so for this I think it is gonna be an interesting module for Drupal.

Automatic creation of web pages is really gonna be helpful to a lot of people and organizations that have their websites using Drupal. For e.g., some clinic with a site might wanna keep their website up to date for their patients about drugs and diseases but do not have much time or editors to do so. They can use this module to create some "TAGS" related to a particular page that pulls news from a particular set of sources. This module is a good start, for the user to pull in content automatically.

We can start pulling data from DAYLIFE as part of this project but can continue adding new content sources like Yahoo or OpenCalais by using some specific data format(Keeping one as standard) flow like JSON later.
The basic idea of this module is that administrator will provide specific Tags for a page(eg. Diabetes,health news in case of Doctor's website) now these tags will be searched and compared in Index OR one more method to use here "term extractor API(Yahoo one)" to extract more tags from article and rematch in Index. At this point we will be with an Article related to our terms. Now this Article is our main Object and with this a unique key is associated , the other infos(like date, images,quotes,articles,links,videos) related with this unique key is automatically fetched to other module present on page. In thisway our page is complete. Also all meta data information of webpage could be made according to search tag results(for SEO purpose only).

I plan to use as many modules available to have data types for any news story or image pulled from the APIs. Any suggestions on modules that are available out there for news content types?

Any more feedback about designing this welcome would be great.

Thanks
Sumit Kataria
http://www.doctorsofta.com

Summer of Code and mentorship!

vineet-gdo's picture

Sumit,

Great to hear that you would want to pursue this project for SoC. First let me just say that I am very impressed seeing folks from colleges in India coming out to do more projects. 10 years back when I went to school in India, there was almost no internet and we never had this much exposure to come into the developer communities and do projects. So kudos! very excited to see this happen.

Also, I love your suggestion about extending this project later to get data from other sources. I would definitely want to re-use as many existing modules as possible and learn from design of modules like feedapi to design this module.

I would be very excited to mentor you for this project. I would request the community here to give us more feedback for the project proposal and help us get into the Summer of Code acceptance list.

Cheers!

-- Vineet Gupta
Cool stuff - http://labs.daylife.com
Recipes - http://cookbook.daylife.com
DayPIs - http://developer.daylife.com

compare the idea with this

matslats's picture

http://www.managingnews.com/
a new service from development seed

Managing News

agentrickard's picture

The scope is different. Managing News pulls from several sources, whereas DayLife is a news service.

This is a challenging proposal in that DayLife is a commercial web site, looking to expand adoption of its API.

Vineet has offered to mentor, but has no Drupal background. It may be better to left Daylife do a direct hire of the student.

I am, however, tempted to move this to an official proposal since we have both mentor and student interest.

--
http://ken.therickards.com/
http://savannahnow.com/user/2
http://blufftontoday.com/user/3

commercial use

vineet-gdo's picture

Ken,

We do have a free version of our API at http://developer.daylife.com . We are removing the "non-commercial use only" restriction on the free api platform from our developer site. We want developers and bloggers using the Drupal platform to be able to pull news content to do interesting things on their blogs and applications.

It is true that I do not have drupal experience but I believe with help of the drupal forums and community and Sumit's enthusiasm for this project - we can build a good drupal module for this project. Plus, I would be glad to have anyone else interested in this area to mentor/co-mentor this project with me.

Cheers!

-- Vineet Gupta
Cool stuff - http://labs.daylife.com
Recipes - http://cookbook.daylife.com
DayPIs - http://developer.daylife.com

Student application

agentrickard's picture

Then we should encourage Sumit and interested students to apply -- any student can submit his or her own application to Google.

My reasoning explains, I think, why this project was not moved to the official ideas list. On that list, we actively recruit students for projects recommended by others.

--
http://ken.therickards.com/
http://savannahnow.com/user/2
http://blufftontoday.com/user/3

Appication Submitted Already

sumitk's picture

I have already submitted my application for this project to Drupal
Some people replied to my applications and now I have made all suggested changes to it aswell

Very much looking forward to this project this summer.........
Cheers!!
sumit kataria
http://www.doctorsofta.com