Google News, Syndication and stuff

[Julian Bond <julian_bond@voidstar.com>]

In the unlikely event that you didn't already know, Google news has just 
taken a huge step forward. As always happens with a new service like 
this it prompts a whole series of new ideas to feed off it's back.

- AFAIK, Google don't provide their news in RSS.
http://radio.weblogs.com/0104308/RssDistillerChannels/ and others are 
scraping it to produce RSS, but wouldn't it be better if Google produced 
it themselves.

- I find the Google categories a bit broad. I could well imagine them 
using the same technology to produce 500 channels instead of 5 and 
moreover making other aggregators and clipping services redundant in the 
process.

- The News search is particularly powerful. Making it possible to turn a 
free form News search into an RSS channel would almost solve the 
previous question.

- If they've currently got 4000 sources, is there any reason why it 
shouldn't work with 40,000? Is there an alternative to Blogdex in here? 
A Google Blogs to match Google News.

- Where and how should the Google API fit into this?

- And lastly, when are they going to close the loop, and accept 
weblogs.com style pings? "I've updated, please scrape me". Or better 
yet, "I've updated, here's my latest content".

I strongly suggest we all start hassling them via the feedback form with 
these and other questions.

--
Julian Bond Email&MSM: julian.bond@voidstar.com
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