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The NGOID news network Idea

On Jan 26, the Gujarat state was rocked with a devastating earthquake. We at i3Connect, decided to help in someway. After some brainstorming, we decided to launch an information portal to distribute information about the earthquake. We used php-nuke, an information portal, which we use to run GyanQuest.net to create i3Connect.org.

Our site mission statement talked about what we were trying to do -
While, there were several news sites and information sources where the media news was being reported, the scale of the tragedy would prevent the reporters to get much specific beyond major trouble spots such as Bhuj and Ahmedabad. But there are numerous small villages and towns all over the district of Kutch and the state of Gujarat that we had no news.

There were good chances that reporters will not get to each of these places to report the news of people dead or alive and their needs. Most of the news that was available from these remote places were from the individuals who have been able to reach out to their relatives or friends.

Still there are hundreds of thousands of us who are waiting to know ANY news about our loved ones. We think it is very important for the individuals to have a channel to publish whatever information they have about their area, their neighbors or about their own self. This will help others derive some information about their loved ones who are not able to reach out.

i3Connect.org achieved limited success, due to the fact that others also tried to do similar things but we could not co-ordinate our news gathering and the user could not find the information about their particular relative and news in that small town of Kutch. In the end, it was a lesson in humility, with all the technology at our disposal and all the talk about how the Internet as a medium of communication - we were let down by information which was scattered all over the Internet and no way to bring them together.

As we looked back, we needed a system that would let people post information anywhere on the Internet and that information is shared among different portals or web blogs. The poster can post on any site on the network and this is available to other sites on the Internet. In a sense, we went back to the past and borrowed a page from the NGOID project.

What it does is pretty simple and is illustrated using a simple example.
Posting a link or article to a news item would allow an item to be used by any other portal/web blog. If a person did not have a favorite portal, they could post it directly to the NGOID News. Also, if your site supports an RSS(XML) feed, you can add it to the News Network database.
By doing smart searches and filtering the information from the NGOID database, users could get the information that is important to them.

What the NGOID News Network want to do is to create a network to support distributed journalism, where every observer could participate as a journalist. We are a long way off from this goal but with this small step, we are on our way. Please support us by helping this project in any way you can.

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visit http://ngoid.sourceforge.net/sub_rss.php for more details