RSS Aggregators
From wsuwiki
RSS feeds can be aggregated in a variety of ways, for a range of purposes. Here is an example (accessed Aug 1, 2006) of an aggregator bringing together news from several sources about the DOPA legislation being considered in the US Congress. This page gives an idea how RSS, along with aggregator and email tools can be used to assemble news on a topic from multiple sources.
For a list of RSS feeds at WSU, see this page.
Uses for Aggregators to Enhance Learning
An aggregator could bring together a variety of RSS feeds into a single place, which could be a dynamic set of readings for a course.
Website Aggregators
- Google Reader is a popular tool for aggregation. Allows users to "star" favorite articles, or share them with others. (Free, requires a Google account).
- Bloglines is an example of a service that will display selected RSS feeds on a personal page. (Free, requires creating an account, aggregation is per account and private).
- SuprGlu both aggregates RSS and makes the result a public web page, for example Nils page. (Free, public 3rd party service, requires creating an account to edit).
- Page flakes a portal-like page that can contain multiple RSS feeds in a tiled display.
- Netvibes is another portal-like page(s) with widgets including RSS. The resulting pages can be shared.
Timeline Aggregators
- Dipity will take multiple RSS feeds and render them as a timeline. You can overlay other items on the timeline, such as special events. Notes:
- Will accept a Google Reader feed, but be aware that some feeds need to be made public in reader (see manage preferences/tags) before they can be used in Dipity.
- Would not accept a Del.icio.us feed, probably a RSS version issue. This was corrected by running the feed thru FeedBurner.
Sparse feeds
If the feeds you wish to aggregate have infrequent updates, then merging several may make a new feed with frequent enough updates to be interesting.
- Yahoo Pipes will take multiple feeds, and mix them into a single feed. You can process the feeds as they are mixed, including filtering for certain terms, or sorting by date.
- Google Reader will allow you to make a folder of multiple RSS feeds. The folder itself has an RSS feed, and the contents of the feed are date sorted, making the result an aggregate.
- RSS Mix will take several RSS feeds and create a new single feed from them. The resulting feed has the items sorted by posting date. (Free, public 3rd party service, no account required.)
- FeedDigest can mix, filter and republish feeds to HTML, or syndicate to a new feed (like RSSMix). They seem to be having problems scaling to the demand (Feb 2007). They also promise email to RSS soon.
- FeedBurner will take an RSS feed (perhaps your blog) and "link splice" your Del.icio.us links, "photo splice" your Flickr photos, and several other services, providing a kind of aggretation.
- It would be nice to extend this list of tools
Dense feeds
Dense feeds are the opposite of sparse ones, there are too many and too frequent postings to make reading headlines practical for most people.
- Tag Cloud (Service is offline Feb, 2007) (Free, public 3rd party service, requires creating an account to create a cloud).
- TagCrowd will perform a similar function, but does not seem to process RSS and seems to do it once, not each time a page is loaded. The ideal tool would be called from within a web page, pass RSS to the cloud converter, and return an image.
- MakeCloud does work with RSS, but the resulting cloud is not as handsome as TagCloud's.
- This Google search found a number of cloud creating resources including the two above.
Advanced aggregator
Yahoo Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs. Here is a tutorial in CTOwiki.
Web pages
In a typical static web page, this requires some client-side conversion of the XML in the RSS feed to HTML. A Google search of RSS to HTML will yield some 3rd party solutions, typically javascript calling a 3rd party. See Portal options below for server side solutions. Also, note, TagCloud will display its aggretation in a web page.
Displaying RSS in Oracle portal pages
See RSS to HTML.
Displaying RSS in Microsoft SharePoint pages
SharePoint 2007 ships with an RSS webpart that will display several RSS feeds. Each feed's items are displayed together, the items are not interleaved chronologically. To accomplish the interleaving, use Google Reader (above). In some browsers the user may get "insecure items" warnings because WSU's SharePoint is SSL encrypted (https) and feeds typically are not SSL. This can be annoying to the user.
Item Aggregation
Rather than aggregate whole feeds, it may be desirable to aggregate items from several feeds into a different presentation.
- Technorati is an RSS search engine (list of others) It also provides a means for 3rd parties to create an aggregation by using a Technorati tag in their posts (pages).
- del.icio.us allows users to tag and bookmark URLs, which results in (among other things) an aggregation of URLs by tag.
- Google Reader will accomplish this with "share" and "tagged" items. Be sure to "manage preferences/tag" to make the resulting feeds pulblic.
- A "Carnival" is the concept for a web page (typically a blog post) that is the manual aggregation of various RSS items (Technorati or del.icio.us might be used to provide the raw material). Think of a Carnival as an annotated bibliography of recent blog posts on a topic.
See Also
Categories: Bibliography | Internet Tools | RSS | Blog