Seattlebrief.com is now live in beta.

Its purpose is to let you quickly get the pulse of what Seattleites are writing and talking about. It rolls up headlines and commentary from more than twenty local sources from across the political spectrum.

It indexes headlines from places like Crosscut, The Urbanist, Geekwire, The Stranger, Post Alley, Publicola, MyNorthwest.com, City Council press releases, Mayor’s office press releases, Q13FOX, KUOW, KOMO, KING5, Seattle Times, and more. It’s also indexing podcasts and videocasts from the Pacific Northwest, at least those focused on civic, community and business issues in Seattle.

Seattle isn’t a monoculture. It’s a vibrant mix of many different people, many communities, neighborhoods, coalitions and voices. But there are also a lot of forces nudging people into filtered silos. I wanted to build a site which breaks away from that.

Day to day, I regularly hit a variety of news feeds and listen to a lot of different news sources. I wanted to make that much easier for myself and everyone in the city.

Seattlebrief.com is a grab-a-cup-of-coffee site. It is designed for browsing, very intentionally, not search. Click on the story you’re interested in, and the article will open up in a side window. It focuses on newsfeeds which talk about civic and municipal issues over sports, weather and traffic.

I’ll consider Seattlebrief.com a success if it saves you time catching up on local stories, or introduces you to more voices and perspectives in this great city.

How it works

There are so many interesting and important voices out there, from dedicated news organizations like The Seattle Times to more informal ones like neighborhood blogs. I wanted a quick way to get the pulse of what’s happening. Seattlebrief pulls from the RSS feeds of more than twenty local sites, from all sides of the political spectrum: news sites, neighborhood blogs, municipal government announcements, and activist organizations. The list will no doubt change over time.

Many blog sites and news organizations support Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to publish their latest articles for syndication elsewhere. For instance, you can find Post Alley’s RSS feed here. RSS is used to power Google News and podcast announcements, among other things.

RSS is a bunch of computer code which tells aggregation sites: “here are the recent stories,” usually including a photo thumbnail, author information, and description. Seattlebrief uses this self-declared RSS feed, currently from over 20 sources in and around Seattle. It regularly checks what’s new. Another job then fetches each page and “enriches” these articles with the social sharing metadata that is used to mark up the page for, say, sharing on Facebook or Twitter. 

Think of it as a robot that simply goes out to a list of sites and fetches the “social sharing” info for each of them, then puts them in chronological order (by way of publication date) for you. The list of sites Seattlebrief uses will no doubt change over time.

Origin

Over at Post Alley, where I sometimes contribute, there was a writers’ room discussion about the Washington Post’s popular “Morning Mix” series. Morning Mix highlights interesting/viral stories around the web.

Sparked by that idea, I wanted to build a way to let me browse through the week’s Seattle-area headlines and commentary more easily. So I built Seattlebrief.

I’d welcome any key sources I’ve missed. Right now, they must have an RSS feed. And regrettably, some important/thoughtful voices like KUOW have long ago decommissioned their RSS feeds. I’m exploring what might be possible there.

Drop me a note.

I’d love it if you checked out Seattlebrief.com, and let me know your thoughts.