Library clips

Check out this Drupal powered Public RSS Aggregator called CMS News (or what they call a meta-news aggregator).

On the left

List of the sources (various blogs/websites)…obviously you have to have a feed to be a source, as these new types of automated portals are based on the power of re-syndication…clicking on these sources will take you to the native site.

If you are making your own newsmastering portal…in your hunt for sources you may find some are suitable sources but not all their content is relevant to the portal at hand, in this case you would have to look at finding a category feed or use Blogdigger to make one, otherwise use Blogdigger or a tool such as Feed Digest to filter the feed…see more tools.

On the right

List of the titles of most recent items.

On the bottom of the right sidebar is a Navigation heading with a recent posts link
…here you can sort posts by Type, Title, Author, Last Post (this page didn’t seemed to be working)

Not sure what you can do if you log-in

In the body

Most recent items excerpts:

- The “Title” links to the native site
- The “Source” links to a page within the portal where you can view the recent items by just that source
- The “Feed” links does the same as the “source” link (bit of duplication here)
- The “Visit” links takes you to the native site

Now I’ve noticed there is no RSS feed, but if you click on an auto-subscribe button (such as Bloglines), a feed makes itself known.

Along the top

Here there are a few choices:

- Latest News (front page)

- News By Source

Lists approx. most 20 recent items [by title] from each source under a source heading…see here (this is a bit of a compilation page where you can view contents by source all in the one page).

If you click on more (under the last item in each source) it will go to a page with all latest items (with excerpts) from just that source…here is the source Boxes and Arrows.

Here you will see, the source details at the top of the page (incl. feed, and time/date of last update)…and below this is the excerpt of the latest items, clicking the title takes you to the native site, so does a link called visit (bit of duplication again)

- News By Topic

This is interesting, it seems to show that this portal is made up of to channels (2 aggregators in one)…the source list on the left sidebar are all sources for both channels, but one channel is made up from the sources that are blogs, and the other channel contains sources from the list that are more general websites (or non-blogs)…see here.

So you can see that each channel has a list of items (by title only) and under the last item on either channel is a more link.

So one channel or bundle is called CMS News Aggregator, and the other is called CM Pros Weblogs.

If you click on the CMS News Aggregator bundle it is exactly the same as the front page (although the URL is different), clicking on the CM Pros Weblogs takes you to another would be front page (I guess they have to choose one of these bundles to be the home page…but couldn’t they have merged both as a front page).

Also if the CMS News Aggregator bundle is the default homepage you would think they would choose the CM Pros Weblogs bundle on the right sidebar.

Anyway, back to the top…

- News Sources

List of sources like on the left side bar

…with an RSS feed.

Conclusion

So it seems the general RSS feed must be for both bundles together (I’m not sure)…it would be good to also have an individual feed for each bundle as well.

Not sure what happens when items fall off the front page (or each bundle page), also when they fall off the page by each source…I don’t think there is any archiving here, it’s purely just for current stuff.

This brings me to why content isn’t bothered to be organised in categories, as the content isn’t around for long…even if it did archive content how would it use categories, would it carry over categories from each blog (would the category have to be transported within the RSS feed) or could the computer make a category on the fly based on an algorithm.

Maybe you could use TagCloud by entering in all the RSS feeds of the sources and generate a computer estimated keyword categories for your portal…this sounds easy…the whole idea is that it is automated, so you don’t want to sit there indexing yourself…although Newsmastering doesn’t have to be automated, the RSS Radars you set up can go through a human screening process before they are presented in the portal - you’d want to get paid to do this!

This is a great portal (Public RSS Aggregator), for my liking it needs:

RSS feeds for each bundle, and a general RSS feed

TagCloud

Explanation of what the site is and how it works

Structure it to be more clear in there being two bundles/channels, or even a tab to differentiate between each bundle, and a page combining both bundles (maybe also include 2 source lists, one for each bundle)

Also get rid of links that do the same thing as another link right next to it

…see a related post.

Basic summary of Aftermail:

“Simple in concept, but highly functional in deployment, AfterMail automatically captures email messages sent through an email server, and intelligently stores them in a single, separate, centralized email archival and analysis system. Once stored, AfterMail provides easy access to these messages, allowing permitted users to search and retrieve their own messages, or for managers and administrators to search across the entire organization.”

AfterMail’s latest press release mentions that it is now RSS enabled.

Now people can search their email and get an RSS, so when the search term appears in new email you will get new feed content.

Benefit of this is that when you look at your full inbox in the morning, you don’t really know what is personally pertinent to you, but if you have set up a search term feed, you can sort through your new email by keyword, helping you decide the order of importance
(NOTE: it’s not a subject term, but only a keyword).

Maybe you could also restrict your search term feed to an email group or a selection of email addresses, as well as your whole inbox.

At the manager level, it seems they can search through an email archive (privacy issues?) of the whole email system - I wonder if they too can limit this to certain addresses or groups.
This is starting to sound like security intelligence, because if you can subscribe to an RSS feed of any keyword that appears in any new email across your whole company, it is akin to intelligence units using computers to pick up keywords from phone conversations.

A thought…maybe your inbox could be ranked according to keywords (including keywords highlighted in the message, and even listed in a keyword field, next to the title field or date field).

A lot of the problem today is information overload, in the sense you get pushed a lot of email’s you don’t care about, hopefully enterprise RSS solutions will help build a “pull” culture instead (this will take a while as email is a killer application, people love it’s simplicity and effectiveness - reading feeds in your email client I think will be more successful, or at least the bridge to using a Feed only reading client)
…since you can’t do anything about receiving push email overload, maybe you could have a choice to view email by search term.
That is, when you get a push or broadcast email you don’t care about, ban it from your inbox but allow it in a special search term inbox (kind of like a junk mail box), but you only see the mail if it has the search term, otherwise the system deletes it before you see it, or you could receive all mail in your junk box but have it ranked by search term, with the terms highlighted, this makes it easier to glean over and confidently delete.

Blogdigger explains their concern with re-syndicating search results:

“Our Terms of Service state that our search results feeds are licensed only for individual, non-commercial usage, meaning, they are meant to be used by individual people subscribing in aggregators. There are many sites that take content from Blogdigger (as well as other RSS-output services) and automatically post it to web pages in an effort to increase their search engine rankings with folks like Google.”

…they add that this has become even more of a concern when ads are incorporated into RSS feeds.

Also how do you keep track of people re-syndicating re-mixed versions(splicing/filtering) of your feeds, as the RSS feed has a different URL when it is re-mixed.

My query is that the content doesn’t belong to Blogdigger anyway, it belongs to the the various blog owners…but I suppose they supply a service of delivering search results - the content packaged in personlised ways, ie. allow you to monitor RSS content according to your information needs, you can’t do this on a big scale (rss sphere or blogosphere) without a search engine.

I posted earlier the concern with people re-publishing blog content by using Public RSS aggregators…I guess re-syndicating on the sidebar of your blog doesn’t hurt if it is javascript (non-search engine friendly), but there are other re-sydication formats where search engines will index content from your site (that actually originates elsewhere).

But I’m not savvy on advertising so I’m not sure how it works, because if someone re-syndicates your content they will be getting the ads appearing in the website/blog as well, and if they click on an ad won’t that be good for whoever owns the RSS feed?
…For monetary reasons I see ads in RSS feeds as a bonus as now wherever your content is re-hosted people can still click on ads and make money for the original host.