Social media aggregation comes to Occupy Wall Street

By Mike Flacy November 5, 2011

occupationalist — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Since the launch of the leaderless Occupy Wall Street movement approximately seven weeks ago, tracking ongoing events in New York City has been difficult due to the limited media coverage as well as the massive size of the protest. The events on Wall Street have also spawned additional protests in several major U.S. cities including Denver, Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis and San Diego. Keeping tabs on the latest development has now become simpler with the launch of Occupationalist, a social media aggregator that combines constantly updated content from Tumblr, Twitter, Google Video, Meetup.com and Foursquare into a single page.

The Twitter feeds are organized by hashtags specific to the overall movement and various cities. For instance, tweets with the #OWS hashtag are shown on the left side of the page and tweets using hashtags with specific city names, like #OCCUPYBALTIMORE or #OCCUPYLA, are shown down the middle of the page. Videos from Google’s Picasa Web are displayed along the right side of the page. At the top of the page, users will find a collection of pictures from Tumblr of people holding up explanations about being part of the “99%”. Below that section, visitors can find a visual map of FourSquare check-ins at each specific protest as well as a Bing map that displays Meetup.com locations for people to organize protests in smaller cities.

The site was constructed by members of a program called Boulder Digital Works which appears to be affiliated with the University of Colorado. The accelerated program involves graduate studies around entrepreneurship, Web technology and creative skills in relation to media and business design. The 60-week program offers courses in interactive design on platforms like tablets and smartphones and the cost of the entire program is $25,000 for tuition.

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