I seem to keep forgetting to take a look at the nifty Blogdigger service- a site that allows you to drop in a pile of RSS feeds, and have it return to you a single RSS that represents a combination of all the content. And there is more every time I go back.
My experiment has been to assemble the RSS feeds from known learning objects (ugh here comes that word…) repositories into one Learning Objects Bloggdigger group. You can subscribe to this feed via its own RSS URL:
http://groups.blogdigger.com/rss.jsp?id=252
But when you go to the Blogdigger page for this group they offer a search field, so you can key word search for results within this pile of objects, for example, all the items among the Learning Object feeds that contain the word “math”.
Nice.
But wait, there is more. This customized display also has a customized RSS feed- so you could subscribe to a subset of this feed:
http://groups.blogdigger.com/rss.jsp?search=1&id=252&q=math&sortby=date
Sweeeeet.
This is understanted and overly powerful. This is ripping up content from a collection of discrete RSS feeds and re-combining it into something new. Maybe if we could assign our own “tags” to feeds, we could have a wacky place like flickr’s tagged photos.
Well, that might be over-board.
But think about it– getting into consuming content via RSS is a small step for humans, but now mixing feeds and creating new feeds from that, well, that is one great leap for human-kind.
And then it might be tossed into feedburner, mixed with photo feeds and furl-ed sites, and…. what a stew!
Hey Alan,
This is very, very cool, but I have tried numerous times to get it to work with no luck. Everytime I try to create a group, I get an error. Have you tried it lately? Is it working for you?
Hi Will – we seem to have a bug in creating feeds; we’re working on it over the weekend, and hopefully will have it fixed very, very soon. Sorry for the inconveinence.
Alan – once again, right on; but you know that Furl and Flickr export RSS, so mixing them into a Group should be no problem, in fact, many have done this. Perhaps we need to add in easy to use wizards for those services…what do you think?
Greg,
You are qucik again on the response, thanks! I think you may want to look at how Feedburner is set up- they make it quite easy to add a number of services with just supplying your account info.
The thing about Feedburner I dislike or missed is that you onloy get to mix one set. I want more!
Greg,
You are qucik again on the response, thanks! I think you may want to look at how Feedburner is set up- they make it quite easy to add a number of services with just supplying your account info.
The thing about Feedburner I dislike or missed is that you onloy get to mix one set. I want more!