Library clips :: October

October 7, 2007

K-Collector is back

Filed under: blogs, rss, newsmaster, readers

K-Collector back-end feed aggregator is back with a new example, the Italian website nova100.

K-Collector is an advanced public feed aggregator, similar to MySyndicaat, where it works in the back-end to power sites.
I mentioned it in a post over 2 years ago…see RSS: transport topics.

NOTE: MySyndicaat also has a generic UI and host version

A simpler version of both these tools is SuprGlu, which lots of people would be familiar with…

So what does K-Collector have in common with these RSS remixers?

Well not only does it splice lots of feeds together for a mixed river of news, but it also collects the tags from each post, so you can browse posts by a tag cloud.

Basically, like the other two it creates a mini Technorati Tags…see my post on a DIY Technorati Tags for your Reading List.

Hmmm, just thinking about this, I wonder if Grazr could get into OPML grazing by tags, ie. recognising tags within RSS feeds, and creating a tag cloud, so then you could read an OPML file by tags (probably not a tagcloud, but a tag outline).

Three methods

I see three ways tags or topics can be utilised from a bunch of feeds (or OPML):

- transporting author tags
- suggest tags (just like what ZoomClouds does for my blog…WizAg and MyFeedz will do this for an OPML)
- content is analysed and filed into a pre-chosen set of tags (best fit approach)

Anyway check out nova100, there are 3 views:
- Typical newspaper view where only the latest post is categorised into in-house sections eg. Technology, Science, Entertainment, Business (this must be handpicked, not sure).
- Blog view…basically a river of news (mixed stream of the lastest posts)
- Tag cloud view

In each view the sidebar has photo’s of each blogger, so you can click to read just that blog.

MySyndicaat

While we are on the topic, there are two things I’d like to mention about MySyndicaat:

1. synonym ring
- you can tune the system to say “when you see a post with the tag FEED, change the tag to RSS”
…this keeps your tag cloud nice and neat

2. digest
- from the automated river of news you can handpick posts and send them to the digest river of news

Now if we could pimp up our MySyndicaat to look less generic and more like nova100, then we could all be newsmasters disguised as webmasters.

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