Puffbox

I note Sky News are trying something unusual in their coverage from Beijing. All 22 members of the crew departing Osterley for the Olympics will be contributing to an ‘Olympic Twitter Microblog‘. They promise we’ll hear from ‘presenters, reporters, producers, camera operators and engineers: 22 different perspectives, 22 different pairs of eyes & ears, and 22 different experiences of Beijing 2008’ – all via SMS, by the look of it.

It’s an interesting idea, but not without its problems. Of the 22 in question, we might recognise the names of a couple – Chris Skudder, Jeremy Thompson. The rest – no offence, chaps – could be anybody; and I can’t see many people signing up to follow them. There’s a generic SkyNewsOlympics account, but at the moment, it’s little more than a directory of the other 22 accounts.

So the only way to follow the entire group effort is via the page on the Sky website… which may or may not have been a conscious decision. But an idea occurs to me: could you aggregate the 22 accounts back into Twitter from outside, using Twitterfeed, and the 22 individual (outbound) RSS feeds? A bit of a roundabout method, but I’ve done such RSS-cannibalism before, to great effect.