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Experimental RSS aggregation
Last Tuesday I went public with http://www.b2bslash.com This was
intended to be a replacement for the company website but more
interestingly for this audience it was an experimental attempt to
combine some facets of /., RU, newsblogger and so on but targeted at a
specific niche audience.
What I've done is to take 10-12 newsfeeds all about B2B ecommerce. I
aggregate them and provide a composite LIFO display or you can view them
by source. The second part of the system is a /. or Kuro5Hin style
community journalism system. The link between them is that any headline
can form the basis of a new story. Of course, there is also RSS output
and even an XML-RPC link for cross posting to a Manila based blog. The
whole thing was built on top of Drupal in PHP, MySQL, Apache.
Sadly on Thursday, I was made redundant[1] so the future of b2bslash.com
is uncertain. I own the domain and hosting so it may well continue. Feel
free to join up and contribute, even as just a test.
My other (sic!) obsession is motorcycles, so I've made a start on
converting the whole system into a similar effort but targeted at a
totally different niche. The problem I'm hitting is that there are very
few rss feeds for motorcycle news sites and none of the news aggregators
have a pre-built category. I managed to get NewsIsFree to scrape my
favourite site (thanks mike) and I'm in touch with a techie at EMAP but
I'm not making much progress. Query based feeds at Moreover sort of
work, but their mainstream sources are pretty bad at M/C coverage.
Apart from some SSP(!), this does have a wider relevance. We've pretty
much got the Tech and Mainstream press covered even though there's still
far too much screen scraping going on. But coverage of minority channels
is very patchy. The minority news sources are totally focussed on their
niche but are much less tech aware. "Syndication? What? Why should we
care?".
Any Road Up. Anyone got an RSS source for an Ananova query?
[1]Job offers to the contacts below...
--
Julian Bond email: julian_bond@voidstar.com
CV: http://www.voidstar.com/cv/
HomeURL: http://www.shockwav.demon.co.uk/
WebLog: http://roguemoon.manilasites.com/
M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173 T: +44 (0)192 0412 433
ICQ:33679668 tag:So many words, so little time