One of the highest value blogs for me is Scripting News by Dave Winer. This week he posted an entry – RSS is the universal language of realtime – that included an RSS-feed (that he hacked together) which presents new entries on the New York Times home page in realtime. If you want to be the first to hear the best news in the country, subscribe to the feed here:
http://static.newsriver.org/nyt/HomePage.xml
In “Tools for Personal Branding – Feed Readers” I described how Google Reader is the core of my news collection toolkit. I just added the NYT-feed to the category of global news and was done. No further changes in process, nothing to remember, just better and more up-to-date news in my list.
This is the power of RSS, you gotta love it. And thank you Dave for the feed!
I had a second example of the power of RSS today.
I am working on a project to understand the power and utility of “social media” and “personal branding”. As part of that I have configured RSS feeds for a Twitter Search and a Tweetmeme Channel to cover what the Twitter universe is saying about these topics. But the amount of noise in these feeds is very high.
Today I received a message from Arthur van Hoff at Ellerdale, that proved to be very helpful. Ellerdale is a new generation of search engine that uses semantic processing to sort through the rivers of realtime information generated by Twitter. It detects “topics” instead of search strings, which has much higher fidelity and less noise. The message from Arthur was that topic pages now come with RSS feeds.
So, using Google Reader, I subscribed to:
http://www.ellerdale.com/topics/view/00a4-3fe7/Social+media.html
and
http://www.ellerdale.com/topics/view/0087-d3f2/Personal+branding.html
I dropped the Tweetmeme subscriptions. Again, that was it, nothing to remember, no process to change. Just better information coming in, with much less noise. I get the benefit of the work of the rocket scientists at Ellerdale, without having to make any change.
As I said, this is the power of RSS and you gotta love it
