Ushahidi wins the Weblog of the Year Award

I’ll say here what I said there yesterday. Ushahidi’s blog is an extension of the community. Many of the blog posts here are written both by our team and by those who use Ushahidi all over the world. A lot of time is spent writing and coming up with the blog posts to educate and share the experiences of how to better crowdsource information in very trying times.

The list of winners from the different languages and categories was stunning. I had a chance to speak with a couple of the other winners and was struck with just how fortunate we were to win this award, as any one of them could have as well.

A big thank you to Deutsche Welle for putting this event on and honoring us with this award. An even bigger thank you to the Ushahidi community that earned this award with us.

Asante.

For all you WordPress publishers out there interested in SwiftRiver there are two official plugins we’re releasing today that bring Swift to your platform of choice: WP-SiLCC and WP-Veracity.

WP-SiLCC

WP-SiLCC is an auto tagging plug-in. Users who run news sites or aggregators should consider using this to add a basic level of taxonomy to all posts. WP-SiLCC also allows users to tag their own posts for sites that prefer a more folksonomic approach. WP-SiLCC uses active learning techniques to improve how it parses text over time.

Download WP-SiLCC from WordPress.org

WP-Veracity

WP-Veracity applies bayesian algorithms to your content to help surface posts based on “interestingness”, influence and time-published rather than popularity alone. From SwiftRiver’s perspective, popularity is only an indicator of influence, not necessarily an indicator of authority. This plug-in calculates popularity (number of hits, trackbacks, comments), a bayes score and time (older content falls off organically) to offer a better picture of the most interesting posts on your blog at any given time.

Download WP-Veracity from WordPress.org

For developers interested in creating their own plugins using Swift Web Services, visit our documentation wiki.

[Press release: Ushahidi Redesign and Funding Announcement]

A big thanks goes out to Richard “Ochie” Flores for the excellent design, Kwame Nyong’o for the beautiful illustrations, and Ivan Bernat for the spotless HTML/CSS markup.

Grab a Button

Help show your support for Ushahidi with our new buttons and badges!

	Ushahidi 170px <a href="http://ushahidi.com/"><img src="http://www.ushahidi.com/images/buttons/ushahidi_button1_170px.gif" alt="Ushahidi: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information" /></a>
	Ushahidi 200px <a href="http://ushahidi.com/"><img src="http://www.ushahidi.com/images/buttons/ushahidi_button4_200.gif" alt="Ushahidi: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information" /></a>
	Ushahidi 200px <a href="http://ushahidi.com/"><img src="http://www.ushahidi.com/images/buttons/ushahidi_button6_200.gif" alt="Ushahidi: Crowdsourcing Crisis Information" /></a>