RSS: transport topics
In a post a couple of days ago I was mentioning saving items to an RSS reader clippings folders…if these folders have RSS feeds, they can then populate a blog via RSS-to-HTML…this way you don’t have to manually write blog posts, you just curate content to automatically fill a blog.
The case was whether to do this from RSS reader to blog, or use a middleware, so it would be, RSS reader to Bookmarks to Blog.
When I was checking out the “add furl to my site” features of Furl I was quite impressed.
Even though using a (middle man) bookmarks manager may not be required, some of them, like Furl, have great features, especially the built in RSS-to-HTML offering that can be customised to your liking…the presentation can be altered, and the structure can flow by date or by topic.
The only problem is that if I populate a blog from multiple topics in Furl, the content will be structured by topic in the blog, but will appear as one entry.
I could use the RSS-to-HTML function multiple times, one topic at a time, into the same blog. This way each entry is devoted to one topic.
But what about browsing in the blog by topic.
The only way I could do this is aggregate all the blogs into a master blog, and each blog would be a category in the master blog.
But you may not require all these blogs…is there a way doing it just with one blog?
What if I want the topics in Furl to be categories in the one blog?
This would be like a blog version of the furl account (topics included).
This would mean the topic code would have to be within the RSS of the topic.
I’ve only seen an example of this at K-Collector…from the website:
“We have developed an extension to the RSS format called Easy News Topics. ENT extend the RSS format allowing it to transport topics with every piece of information sent.
Thanks to its powerful TopicManager, K-Collector users can easily attach to every post they create in their weblogs, either choosing them from a list of topics already available or, if necessary, creating new ones.
K-Collector can also process RSS feeds coming from external sources and automatically indicize these contents using the list of topics used within a group of users (or cloud).”
Wow, not only is it unique in transporting a topic, but it can also decide to conjure up a suitable topic if there isn’t already one included in the RSS feed.
This is similar to Yahoo! News Tag Soup…they conjure topics for items by using the Content Analysis Web Service.
I wish the folks at Furl had a forum so these issues could be discussed, and maybe incorporated.
Here is the ENT documentation.
Here is an explanation of ENT, and how it relates to recent advances (check out the comments apparently, Blogware blogs can implement ENT)…and more.
The ENT concept works a treat in gathering and organising information from a knowledge management perspective…see more.
Also on this note, check out this post mentioning “open topics”, that is, not having to use the Technorati domain in the tags in your blog posts.
More posts on Technorati tags and domain names:
Technorati tags: an introduction
…also see podcast tags.
Extra: this post mentions using tags as sub-categories to the blog categories, something I mentioned a while back (blog categories as a macro view and tags as subject terms).
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Great to see you picking up on these issues.
As my post and the spec make clear, you don’t need to use a technorati URL for a tagspace, you can use your own category link pages, or Wikipedia, Flickr or whomever.
If you put rel=”tag” on them, we’ll index them, and other people can too.
Comment by Kevin Marks — June 1, 2005 @ 9:48 am
In fact, you can invent your own tagspace, I did exactly this.
http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/?guid=20050531135126
Comment by Randy Charles Morin — June 2, 2005 @ 8:05 pm
So good,Thanks you.
Comment by computer — June 15, 2005 @ 9:51 am