It seems more and more the projects that we’re involved in, involve RSS. For those you not familiar take a look at What is RSS and Why Should I Care, a very straight-forward article on Search Engine Watch.
First off, RSS feeds continue to multiply: RSS Feeds.com has about 120,000 listed which Feedburner claims over 250,000, but since nearly every blog has an associated RSS feed (or multiple ones), there are literally tens-of-millions of feeds (Technorati claims it has over 33 million blogs in its search engine).
Of course there is a blog dedicated to everything RSS, but what really caught my attention was the way in which a few sites are gathering, mixing, and filtering RSS feeds.
FeedRinse – Is an easy way to “filter” RSS streams. As they claim it, “…lets you automatically filter out syndicated content that you aren’t interested in. It’s like a spam filter for your RSS subscriptions.”
RSS Mix – Allows you mix RSS feeds and create new ones! For example, here’s an HTML page that was created from a mix of four blogs some of which I cited in our Museum Blog Round Up 2. The four sites I threw into this feed are the Ideum blog, Hanging Together, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and The Curator’s Egg.
If you’re looking for more on RSS, Tech Crunch has a recent article on The State of Online Feed Readers with a comparison of Bloglines, feedlounge, Google Reader, and News Gator, among others.
Comments were not working but are back up now.
Thanks for the links, I wasn’t familiar with either of those — looks like some good stuff. We’re actually using Feedshake for our combined feeds, it seems to combine the features of both FeedRinse and RSS Mix: it lets you combine a number of feeds into one chronologically-correct feed, and also filter by keyword (maybe by author, too?). It’s still technically in Beta, but really, what isn’t these days?
The interface is a bit kludgy, but it’s done well for us so far… (and it’s free)
[...] This is not completely unrelated to the converstation that’s been happen at the Walker Art Center, So what is a “blog carnival”? While on the Walker blog we are discussing more “manual” solutions, I recently toyed with the idea that we might be able to create some sort of a combined RSS Feed. [...]
[...] A few months back when there was a flurry of activity around blog carnivals and other ways to increase our authority, a suggestion was made to automate short blurbs for blogs and create links back to them by combining RSS feeds. In a post on Ideum blog, I took a look at FeedRinse, RSS Mix, and other sites that manipulate feeds. [...]