NPR's API and Open Data (Public Media Camp DC 2009)

Today, I attended Public Media Camp in DC to hear/discuss with locals how Public Media + Social Media trends are shifting. Daniel Jacobson from NPR held a session on NPR's API. With a goal of publishing NPR content through various channels, opening up the API and building NPR.org on top of it has resulted in NPR's content showing up repackaged on iPhone apps, member station sites, etc.

The NPR API's target audiences include NPR itself, partners, member stations and the general public. NPR sees the API as a great opportunity to allow the public to cultivate and repackage NPR content in ways that the NPR team doesn't have resource time or expertise to build. One example of a NPR mashup (content + comments) includes http://www.twitter.com/NPRbackstory, which uses Yahoo Pipes to display NPR stories into a twitter feed. WBUR is able to pull in NPR stories wrapped in WBUR.org's visual identify. Requires no human publishing, but of course means they have no control over the content within the news story. Geomapping's up next.

Here's a test project Daniel's been working on: http://danieljacobson.com/NewsMap using Yahoo Placemaker which scans text to guess location and ultimately show stories overlaid on a map. NPR's API output formats include: NPRML feed, RSS, MediaRSS, Podcast, ATOM, JSON, HTML Widget, Javascript widget - learn more on npr.org/api Want more? Here's a collection of articles about the NPR API -> http://delicious.com/metacreek/nprapi