Factba.se v1.8 – We’re almost to v2
We’ll get to the v2 to release. But first, a couple of notes:
1. We’ve been a bit overwhelmed by the requests to assist — voluntarily — with the site and information collection. If we’ve been slow to follow up, see #3 below.
2. We pushed live an internal tool that we think would be useful. One of our unexpected challenges was the lack of a centralized place to gather new information. Update can appear on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, the White House site. To that end, we centralized a realtime feed that pulls together:
- Whitehouse.gov
- Facebook (DonaldTrump, POTUS, Whitehouse)
- Instagram (Whitehouse)
- YouTube (WhiteHouse)
- Twitter (realDonaldTrump, WhiteHouse, POTUS, VP, Mike_Pence, SeanSpicer)
- The White House press distribution list (immediate release only)
…and puts it here: https://factba.se/topic/latest . This is the same feed we use to monitor and add all new public statements. The social feeds update realtime. The White House and email are every 60 seconds. You can also plug it in to RSS, hit the JSON directly, or follow it live on the robotic @FactbaseFeed
If you see a source missing, just let us know. As near as we can tell, it’s the only source that monitors everything coming out of the WHPO from all sources.
3. A bit of personal news. Since the election, Factba.se has become an increasing focus of my life in particular. To that end, I left my day job last week as Vice President / Entrepreneur-in-Residence at U.S. News and World Report to dedicate more time and focus on the platform and content. Based on the traffic, it’s getting regular, repeat use in newsrooms. We hope to become only more valuable as time goes on. This includes getting back to the folks in regard to what we need (mostly: tracking down video for documents).
And if you know a good project manager who could take some time to yell at me daily to stop obsessing on minor details, please send them my way… or just randomly call and yell at me. The 120 Jira tickets aren’t going down fast enough :-).
Onward.