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One feed to rule them all: The NPTech Meta Feed
I enjoy playing with new permutations of the NPtech tagging project. The latest one I've found, the NPTech Meta Feed, is based on a great concept, but it still needs a little debugging.
The feed was created by lazytom (whom I do not know) using FeedJumbler. It draws on all the right sources, plus a few that are new to me:
- http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/nptech
- http://flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=nptech&format=rs...
- http://www.43things.com/rss/goals/tag?name=nptech
- http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/nptech
- http://www.tagsurf.com/rss/tag/nptech
- http://www.furl.net/members/rss.xml?topic=nptech
- http://upcoming.org/syndicate/tag/nptech/
- http://rss.jots.com/tags/nptech
- http://de.lirio.us/rubric/entries/tags/nptech?format=rss
- http://wists.com/everyone/nptech?out=rdf
What a terrific convenience - to be able to look in one place to monitor all the items that are being tagged as relevant to the field of nonprofit technology!
The only problem is that, as of this writing, it doesn't quite work. I've dropped the RSS feed in the righthand column of my blog, and two sources (del.icio.us and TagSurf) currently provide only the message "Error reading source feed." That's not good.
However, when the necessary trouble-shooting is complete, this should be a tremendous boon to those of us who aspire to be nonprofit technology pundits.
The title of this article is a take-off on a theme from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
This article was originally published in my blog, "Technology for the Nonprofit and Philanthropic Sector," under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.
- Deborah Elizabeth Finn's blog
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I made that actually!
Yup, using LazyTom's FeedJumbler, a service that splices multiple RSS feeds into a single one. Similar to FeedDigest or FeedRinse. On the trouble with this being info overload, how to mine: I'm working on a summary of weekend highlights from the nptech metafeed right now, will post at net2 asap!
About that feed
I didn't actually create that meta-feed - I just created the feedjumbler tool/website. Anbody can use that website to create meta-feeds like that.
The Challenges of MetaFeeds
This of course is one of the ongoing challenges of "automatic" feeds without some human intervention. Also the broader the tag and the feeds the more challenging it is to continue to find targeted useful info. On the other hand these feeds do narrow the playing field for further mining.