Library clips

My ultimate goal in Newsmastering or a clipping service is to refine RSS feeds to a precise level that I no longer have to check the (content coming from the feeds) before it gets posted to a blog.

That is, you can now have a totally automated blog that is automatically curated according to the refined filtering of your RSS feeds.

If you do all the back-end work in manipulating the RSS feeds you no longer have to curate the blog or manually post; you as the infomediary can be taken out of the loop.

So the needs are:

• a blog that self-posts
• the posts are all relevant according to the purpose of your blog

Search the blogosphere

Depending on the scope and purpose of your blog you can generate search RSS feeds from the web via Blog/RSS engines, such as Bloglines, Blogdigger, Technorati (watch list), Feedster, PubSub, etc…as well as feeds from news, web searches, databases searches, etc..

Problem is that you will always get stuff you don’t want, that is, the content is as good as your search string. This margin of error is OK if you are only covering several feeds but if you are covering millions of sites (as these search engines do) well then the error will scale higher.

I guess you want your posts to be about the search term not just a fleeting mention of the term, it’s all about context.

This process is also OK if you are curating the content yourself, but if your blog posts are being automatically filled from these feeds then you will gets posts that may not belong in your blog.

It also depends on the integrity of your blog, if your intention is to only have a handful of totally relevant posts because your clients only devote 15 minutes reading time a day, then search engine results may not be the go (unless you are viewing the results and posting the content yourself – but our aim is all about automation). If your clients/users, people who will read your blog, don’t mind scanning heaps of posts (of which some may not be exactly relevant) and have the time to do this, well then that’s OK, as long as it serves your purpose.

Saying this, first try engines like PubSub, Feedster, and Blogdigger as they have great search command facilities.

Search a selection

So another option is to pick several feeds that are relevant to your blogs topic.

Since so much of the same information is re-published in lots of blogs you may only need to search a portion of the web. Also you don’t need to re-invent the wheel, you don’t need to scout various resources on the web on a particular topic if somebody already does this in another blog, their coverage and representation of a topic may be enough to re-publish on your blog.

Once you have found your relevant blogs or websites check if they have category or section RSS feeds, this may help to filter the content to your specific needs.

So now you can create various search feeds across your collection of blogs/feeds via Bloglines (search my subscriptions) or via a Blogdigger Group.

Or even better do this on a per feed basis.

Use Blogdigger to make a category feed of an individual RSS feed or even to make a search feed of an RSS feed, try both, make a feed where the search term appears in a category. Feedster can also generate search feeds on a per feed basis.

Once you have done this you can put all the feeds into RSS Mix and blend them into one feed.

Then repeat the process again, your blog may be about social software so you may have different topics like; blogs, social bookmarks, rss, wiki’s, etc…

Presentation

Once you have made all your topic RSS feeds from the RSS Mix blender then you need to put then somewhere.

Superblog is a unique blog that will automatically populate the content in your blog with the RSS feeds you place in it. (include as many as you like)
Blogdigger groups also does this, but it doesn’t have a blog interface look, it has more of an aggregator look.

You don’t have to use Superblog, you can use a tool like RSS Digest to convert the RSS to HTML as a way to present the RSS content into a blog platform of your choice. But it will only do this via one RSS feed, so you would have to put all your feeds into RSS Mix again to create on feed.

Another tool to mix feeds is Feedmarker, soon this aggregator will let you filter feeds on a per feed basis.

So there you have it an automatic blog with content that is precise and relevant, and you don’t have to do anything after the unveiling…it just works itself!

Of course nothing beats the precision of a manually curated blog, but then an automated blog can cover massive amounts of content that you just could not read and re-post in a day.