MySyndicaat has added a few enhancements that really shine.
Digest Support
For every Feedbot (spliced and filtered feed) you make you can make a Digest version (see Advanced options in Feedbot editing).
What this means is that every post in your Feedbot can have a check box, and you can check which posts you want to go into your Digest.
This is a great option, because no matter how much you filter the feeds in your Feedbot, you may still get irrelevant posts…in this case automatic newsmastering may not be precise enough…meaning you need to manually curate posts.
Now you can read your Feedbot Viewer (the webpage to see the contents of your Feedbot - Public RSS Reader)and check which posts you want to send to your Digest…your Digest also has a Viewer at its own URL, and it also has it’s own feed.
So if you decided that automatic newsmastering isn’t doing it for you, start curating the content (if you have time, as this can be a job on its own).
The only problem I see is that if I follow the feed of my Feedbot in my RSS Reader, I can’t check a post into my Digest, now this would be handy.
At the moment I have to read my Feedbot on the viewer page in order to check posts to the Digest, what happens if I miss seeing a few posts, this is what a personal RSS Reader is for (you don’t miss posts, they are highlighted until you read them).
A similar tool is reBlog, from the reFeed RSS Reader you can clip to a blog via a plugin…this blog you are clipping to is what the Digest would be, and reFeed is what the Feedbot would be.
NOTE: reBlog is manual newsmastering only.
The good thing about reBlog is that you clip from your personal RSS Reader, whereas you can’t do that when you follow the Feedbot feed in your personal RSS Reader.
What about non RSS items
Another thing I like about reBlog is that it has a bookmarklet type of functionality, where you can add a webpage that has not come through your RSS Reader.
This is great as sometimes you come across stuff or someone points you to a webpage that you’d like to include in your Digest, but at present it can only be included in your Digest via a Feedbot.
What if this webpage doesn’t have an RSS feed (you could use an RSS Scraper I guess)…sure you can track it by an email alert, or webpage monitoring service…but then how do you submit it to your Digest…there needs to be some sort of bookmarklet.
A way around this is to create a low-key blog and add this blog feed to your Feedbot…when you come across something like a forum post or a random webpage you can make a blog post and it will appear in your Feedbot, then check it to your Digest.
RSS to HTML
Now you can re-syndicate your FeedBot or Digest to HTML or PHP or Javascript…there are a whole heap of rendering options…before you had to use another service, now it’s inbuilt.
This got me thinking of the process; create a Feedbot (splice and filter), view this Feedbot or subscribe to its RSS feed, check items into the Digest, re-syndicate the Digest RSS feed into the body of a blog…if you want to add your own posts to this blog, just blog away…this is another way (as mentioned above) to include those items that don’t have feeds.
In this respect you are curating content from your cleverly constructed RSS Radars (Feedbot) into a blog (via the Digest), and you can also include your own blog posts into this stream.
Feed Elements
In the Editing screen there is a Feed Properties section…here you can edit the attributes that describe your feed. Add yourself as the author, add a description, add some tags, etc…when you view your RSS feed page, you will see these properties (this is back end type of stuff).
Tags
Just like SuprGlu, there is now a tag cloud for each FeedBot and Digest…what this means is that the author tags used in posts are also re-syndicated, this will create a type of category system to browse the posts in your Feedbot…pretty clever I think.
Even better you can create a synonym ring for the tag cloud…the tag cloud will get enormous in no time at all, so you can decide to cluster tags.
You can say when ever the tag “Atom” or “RSS” appears use the tag “feed”…I tried this and it works, my tag cloud had some of these tags, when I made a tag cluster the tags “RSS”, and “Atom” disappeared, now all the posts tagged RSS”, and “Atom” are tagged as “feed”
…wow, as editor I’m overriding the author’s classification.
NOTE: not sure if you can tag cluster for each individual Feedbot, or it applies across all your Feedbots.
Search
Blogdigger Groups still wins in this section as it can search full-text…but MySyndicaat does have more targeted searching.
You can limit your search to a tag and/or date, this also generates a search feed.
At the moment MySyndicaat is reigning in the newsmastering race.
Other features
- Full feed splicing/filtering power
- Disable a feed from your Feedbot at any time
- Contents in your Feedbot Viewer as HTML or text
- Import OPML file or URL
- Creates an OPML URL for each Feedbot (Digests don’t require an OPML as they are curated)
- OPML of all your Feedbots (export as an OPML file or OPML URL - Reading List)…you can choose to include or not include a Feedbot in the Reading List
Each Feedbot contains feeds, so it is a Reading List (but as updated above, doesn’t have a Reading List OPML URL), but what it does offer is a Reading List that contains Reading Lists (all your Feedbots).
Wishlist
- Reading List OPML URL for each Feedbot [ADDED 30/03/06]
- De-dupe URL’s or titles (not sure if it does this)
- Presentation like SuprGlu, although you could re-syndicate into your own blog anyway
- Can’t view posts from just one feed, or even search just one feed…a la Blogdigger Groups
- Since you can’t view posts from one feed, it means they aren’t listed on a sidebar like Blogdigger Groups, although labels would be good for these on Blogdigger Groups.
- Group these source feeds into folders on the sidebar, and view a folder river of news
On this last one maybe the idea is that each Feedbot can be a folder or topic, and then you could have a Master Feedbot Viewer, where all your Feedbots are are listed on the sidebar, and under each one are the source feeds.
Even better is if you could select which FeedBots you want to go into your Master Feedbot, this means you could make several MasterFeedbots.
Then you could read river of news at the general level, each Feedbot level, and also read by a single feed…also search at all these levels…also an aggregated tag cloud from each Feedbot’s tag cloud
…you could have search feeds at all levels, a Master Feedbot feed (spliced feed of spliced feeds), and all the single Feedbot feeds (spliced feeds).
Another approach to organising feeds in folders is to have mini-Feedbots within your Feedbot…eg. you enter 50 feeds (splice and filter them), this is now your Feedbot as per usual, then you groups these feeds into 5 folders or topics (10 feeds per topic)…now the sidebar of your Feedbot Viewer will look like a subscription pane from a typical personal RSS Reader.
You can view river of news for your Feedbot, and also view a river of news for each topic (mini-Feedbot), and you can just view contents from one feed…searching would be the same.
Now you would have the RSS feed for the Feedbot, and each topic (mini-Feedbot) could also have an RSS feed…equally you have an OPML Reading List for your Feedbot, you could also take a topic section from this OPML and create an OPML Reading List for each topic (mini-Feedbot).
These next sections describe an extreme newsmastering portal…in essence creating your own version of a merge of Google News, Topix, Digg, tech.memeorandum, etc…see below.
Future
Advertising
Customise the presentation
An option for your newsmastering portal to subscribe to a remote OPML Reading List
Print newspaper version (RSS Newspaper)
Machine tags…eg.ZoomClouds or TagCloud
Email subscription
IM
Editorial blog along side the newsmaster stream…eg. Corante Web Hub
User Space
User voting (Memedigging)…eg. Feedbutler
User comments and User stories…eg. Digg and Topix
User tags
Maybe the user can even customise their page…eg. Google News
More
Relevance ranking based on Memedigging, link analysis, clicks, etc…
Memetracking (clustering similar stories)…eg.tech.memeorandum
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