Dynamic newsmastering with OPML
My last post got me thinking, what we need our newsmastering portals, such as Blogdigger Groups and MySyndicaat, to do is use Reading Lists.
Sure you can import/export Reading Lists, and both have a dynamic OPML URL (actually Blogdigger Groups doesn’t import OPML’s)
…so if you subscribe to my Blogdigger Group OPML URL and I add a new feed, you will automagically see the new feed in your personal RSS Reader.
But what if I started a Blogdigger Group and instead of entering several feeds, I just imported an OPML URL, like you can at MySyndicaat…but I’m saying when you do this it doesn’t just import a static OPML file, it actually subscribes to it.
So if I go and add/delete a feed from my Reading List (my personal OPML URL), it will also add/delete that feed in the Blogdigger Group…you don’t need to go into the admin section to delete/add feeds, you do it remotely from your OPML URL….whatever or whoever subscribes to that OPML URL will show the changes.
This is what BlogBridge does, it can both create and use Reading Lists, at the moment only two newsmastering services in the market (mentioned above) create Reading Lists, but they can’t use one.
The only major difference is that BlogBridge is a Personal RSS Reader and a Blogdigger Group is a Public RSS Reader…so I can’t see why this hasn’t been done yet…who knows, OPML is moving so fast at the moment, it will probably happen real soon.
Back to creating for a moment…
Although, the benefit of BlogBridge is that you can create and use as many Reading Lists as you like, whereas the newsmastering services can at the moment only create one Reading List…well at MySyndicaat you can create as many feedbots (Reading Lists) as you like, but you can’t place them on a sidebar and select which river of news you want to see. Every feedbot has it’s own page, what about a master page where a selection of your feedbots (Reading Lists) are listed, and you can just click on the river of news you want…or subscribe to the RSS feed or OPML URL (Reading List) of that particular feedbot…a spliced feed of the whole lot could also be generated, as well as a root OPML. This means all the feedbot OPML URL’s would be items (OPML inclusions) in the mega feedbot OPML (root OPML).
The layout (explained in the above paragraph) would just look like a personal RSS Reader.
You’d have a subscription pane consisting of feeds in folders/tags, you can click on a folder and read the river of news, or click on a feed and read content by feed…this folder has a spliced feed (like in Rojo) and it also has an OPML URL Reading List (Rojo doesn’t have this feature, but I’m hoping)…this would be the same for each folder in your subscription pane.
You could also have a spliced feed for the whole account, and a OPML URL Reading List for the whole account…the added feature in a Public RSS Reader (newsmastering service) is that each folder can have it’s own HTML URL.
![email.png](http://services.nexodyne.com/email/icon/GxbiQvgbwBgCnw%3D%3D/oIp%2BJMQ%3D/R01haWw%3D/0/image.png"){kind=icon}
We actually had this feature in an updated version that never made it out the door…we called it synching, where basically, you give Groups an external OPML URL, and we just synchronize to the feeds in that OPML. We’ll have this feature in the next iteration, for sure.
I suppose in an ideal world (in which I find a web developer who can do a decent UI), Groups would act as all these things: an easy way to create a reading list, host an OPML file, as well as synch to an existing reading list and provide the public aggregation and search features that we offer.
Thanks for including Groups in your thoughts, I appreciate it!
Comment by Greg Gershman — March 3, 2006 @ 6:28 am
Say, you can get dynamic OPML browsing with the handy little Windows toolbar applet Taskable: Taskable.
It’s not a hosted app, maybe you can talk the author into doing that?
Comment by rickdog — March 3, 2006 @ 11:07 pm