Trying to teach and old RSS feed some new tricks?
At first RollUp seemed like a nifty idea- build a customized collection of RSS feeds into one site, theoretically coalescing a pile of feeds into one sensible pile. And that becomes a web page you can customize some layout- colors, fonts. And then that single collection itself can be re-syndicated, it having its own RSS feed URL. A way of repacking feeds sounded interesting.
I created an account, tossed in a few instructional technology feeds from my RSS reader’s collection, to create CogDogBlog’s Rolled Up Feeds and its RSS / Syndication URL.
I had first thought it would combine feeds by date, but it just seems to append one blog’s feed right after another. Worse, it has a multiple page display set up, but you are limited to “next”, “back”, with no indication of how many pages there are nor any Google-like way to jump to page 4 rather than single clicking through there.
I cannot see anything RollUp does that Bloglines does not do better and with more finesse. RollUp is just a new web puppy, but it needs a bit more oomph to make it worth my while.
A valued RSS mega-aggregator would: coalesce feeds by date and/or topic, and better yet, remove or at least group redundant blogs that are referring to the same topic or external site.
Part of the tedium of wading through feeds is when 12 different bloggers write a post about the same thing posted originally by say, Stephan Downes, when 10 of them or just an echoing of his blurb, or just “neat post by Stephan” and add nothing more. There is too much echo blogging and not enough commentary or new ideas posted on top of quotes.
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