Twittering Singapore news

Posted on August 5, 2008 by Benjamin Koe

Today I was inspired by the use of Twitter by news agencies such as CNN, BBC, and even our local ChannelNews Asia and wanted to take this innovative usage to the next level by adding multiple sources of Singapore news in a single Twitter stream.

Since there wasn’t a consolidated Twitter stream of Singapore news, I decided to create http://twitter.com/sgnews with the help of TwitterFeed, Yahoo Pipes, and a collection of the best RSS-able Singapore news.

How it works:

  1. I collected a bunch of RSS feeds from ChannelNews Asia, The Business Times, TODAY, Yahoo News Singapore, Tomorrow.sg, and Topix Singapore News.
  2. To clean up duplicates (because sometimes Yahoo syndicates from CNA), I filter them through Yahoo Pipes to get rid of the repeats and form a single consolidated RSS feed.
  3. I put this Piped feed into TwitterFeed which automatically and periodically updates http://twitter.com/sgnews with a nice clean stream of the most current news.
  4. Users can Follow http://twitter.com/sgnews and get the most up-to-date news on Singapore from multiple sources.

I created this as a personal tool to get the news I wanted, but if you like it and find it helpful too, feel free to Follow SGnews on your Twitter account. Also, if you believe there are other good feeds to add, do let me know in the comments below.

Have fun and tell your friends!

Update: I’ve re-jigged the system a little feeding all RSS feeds directly to TwitterFeed and parsing only the Yahoo and ChannelNews Asia ones with Yahoo Pipes because only those two have duplicate entries. This increases and flexibility and reliability of the syndication.

Update 2: I’ve chosen to output only the headlines because in a 140 word Tweet, the body is so badly turncated to make space for the link it’s actually more disruptive than helpful. The new is tidy and clear now.

Filed under: Singapore, Social Media

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18 Responses

  1. Ian Timothy, on August 5th, 2008 at 9:17 pm Said:

    How about SingaporeDaily.net?

  2. Benjamin Koe, on August 5th, 2008 at 10:31 pm Said:

    @Ian, probably not SingaporeDaily because they’re an aggregator which means more repeat content. And besides, if we put it in, it’ll have headlines that go “Daily SG…” “Daily Tech…” and that’s not too helpful really. Best is original content.

  3. Jonathan Wong, on August 6th, 2008 at 12:20 am Said:

    Ben, I think this is a great idea.

    And this is also a perfect example of how far we have come in terms of the number of Web 2.0 tools at our disposal today which allows the everyday user to mix, mash, and re-purpose data in a customized way that suits their own purposes.

    Imagine just five years ago, if you wanted to develop a personalized news syndication service based on multiple data sources and with subscription and broadcast capabilities – surely that would of required a fair amount of coding and screen scraping and all that ugly stuff, right?

    Today, I bet it only took you like 10 minutes to set up that Twitter feed, right? ;)

  4. Kevin Lim, on August 6th, 2008 at 3:29 am Said:

    Yay! I’m sure Ben will figure out more ways to enhance this over time. It’d be cool if this ends up getting more subscribers than the official local news twitter feeds. *hint hint*

  5. Ian Timothy, on August 6th, 2008 at 10:29 am Said:

    hmmm..true….but isn’t tomorrow.sg an aggregator also?

    but i guess it is how the feed is set up. SingaporeDaily puts all the articles into one post. Tomorrow.sg is different – each new article/link is a post by itself.

    Anyway, great work.

  6. The Singapore Daily » Blog Archive » Daily Tech: August Singapore Launch for iPhone 3G, on August 7th, 2008 at 11:46 am Said:

    [...] SG Tech – The eOK .network: Twittering Singapore news [...]

  7. DK, on August 8th, 2008 at 12:04 pm Said:

    Great stuff! Thanks.

    Just a suggestion. Is it possible to mention the source of the news too? Maybe a 3 letter initial like “CNA” at the front or back. :)

  8. Benjamin Koe, on August 8th, 2008 at 2:21 pm Said:

    Hi DK, a few people have suggested I add the source too. I just added it in. Now the newsfeeds will look like: “[CNA] Headline…”

  9. DK, on August 10th, 2008 at 2:25 pm Said:

    Thanks man. :)

  10. Jacelyn, on August 11th, 2008 at 9:46 am Said:

    Cool. Now I can read the news thru your Twitter :)

  11. mryap, on September 24th, 2008 at 6:16 am Said:

    Thanks for the effort. I can follow news in Singapore without following too many Twitter stream

    I intended to create one for news in Ireland.

    Thanks

  12. weathersg01, on November 23rd, 2008 at 2:26 pm Said:

    hey nice twitter feed there, but i’m wondering y i’m not getting the same feeds.

    for e.g. in my comp i see a twitter from sgnews (cna) and in my mobile i get another twitter sgnews(tomorrow.sg)

  13. Benjamin Koe, on December 17th, 2008 at 11:26 am Said:

    Added Straits Times RSS feeds to SGnews

  14. Benjamin Koe, on March 16th, 2009 at 10:33 pm Said:

    I’ve changed the URL shortener from tinyurl to snipurl. Snipurl will allow me to track traffic on the links which will be a really exciting experiment. Watch this blog for reports on how Singaporeans are reading the news on Twitter.

  15. @SGnews stats for April 2009 « The eOK .network, on May 18th, 2009 at 10:38 pm Said:

    [...] stats for April 2009 Posted on May 18, 2009 by Benjamin Koe On 5 August 2008 I started @SGnews to automatically update news about Singapore over Twitter. Today, @SGnews has [...]

  16. PG, on May 22nd, 2009 at 2:17 pm Said:

    Thanks for SGnews on twitter! Is it possible to add the Straits Times’ latest news feed? http://www.straitstimes.com/STI/STIFILES/rss/latest.xml

  17. Benjamin Koe, on May 22nd, 2009 at 2:56 pm Said:

    @PG Thanks for the tip. I’ve added it.

  18. PG, on May 25th, 2009 at 10:46 am Said:

    Thanks!
    Did you notice that Straits Times in now on twitter at @stcom but they are updating manually! @straitstimes seems to be someone/something else not used yet.
    The Straits Times latest news feed http://www.straitstimes.com/STI/STIFILES/rss/latest.xml unfortunately contains both Singapore and non-Singapore news… so it is not purely SG news. Not sure if it is possible to filter only news with …/Singapore/… in the URL?

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