Alphabetically ordered collection of 150+ feeds from vendors of RSS tools, presented as a single-page aggregator. Project by Marjolein Hoekstra (who's she?).
"The main reason for me to make the switch to mySyndicaat as my
preferred feed mixer is that it is capable of creating feed digests
(so-called feedbots) from Reading Lists, which in fact are dynamic OPML
files hosted on a remote server."
Since I first launched my directory of RSS tool vendor news feeds last September, the list has grown steadily to its current size of almost 200 feeds—an increase of 30% in little over two months. The directory is live on display in a Grazr widget in the sidebar of this blog.
I have learned a lot since my last blog post. When I realized I needed a more powerful service to create feed digests than I had been using so far, I soon discovered the incredible web service mySyndicaat, recommended by several of my online friends.
For those who want to see the meat right up-front: here's the RSS Tool Vendor News stream, displayed using mySyndicaat's own feed stylesheet, the Power Viewer. Click on the image to see the live version of the feed. A list of top tags is displayed in the right-hand column, allowing different ways to navigate the feed.
Sidenote: some feed items (especially those from the PageFlakes team blog) seem to have been published with a publishing date that is not recognized by mySyndicaat. I'll report this, mh.
Dynamic OPML Files The main reason for me to make the switch to mySyndicaat as my
preferred feed mixer is that it is capable of creating feed digests
(so-called feedbots) from Reading Lists, which in fact are dynamic OPML
files hosted on a remote server. Note that I spell Reading Lists with initial capitals to make them stand out from just a list of blogs or just a list of recommended books. I maintain my own Reading Lists as categorized groups of feeds in BlogBridge and synchronize these groups with the BlogBridge server to have
my updates propagated. When a Reading List is updated, anyone
subscribing to it will receive a notification of the changes; any
widget capable of displaying dynamic OPML files will also show the most
recent version immediately. Examples of widget engines with real-time awareness of Reading List updates are Grazr,
OptimalBrowser, BittyBrowser and KozOPMLBrowser.
A Plethora of Features Reviewing mySyndicaat is almost like writing an encyclopedic wiki entry about it: there's so much I'd like to tell you about it. Let me just name a few things that seem useful for those who want to get started creating a River of News feed: the central unit within mySyndicaat is called a feedbot, which is basically the aimed end result of your efforts. In my case my feedbots are River of News feeds from other people's feeds. Each feedbot consists of one or more subscriptions, a notion that refers to a particular action that you would like the feedbot to perform. Examples of subscriptions are OPML files and individual feeds, but there's more.
Even while preparing this post I discovered things I didn't know about mySyndicaat, as it can do much more than just create River of News feeds:
it can generate a feedbot on any topic or name, so-called Ego Feeds a.k.a. Topic Radars, pulling in results from blog search engines and social bookmarking sites
it can generate a feedbot containing inbound links to any url, so-called Buzz Monitors, pulling in results from social search engines
it can generate a feedbot from generic search engines, newspapers and social networks
it lets you scrape RSSless websites
it lets you create your own feeds from scratch
it lets you edit and delete any item and any feed element in your feedbot
Once you get the hang of mySyndicaat, you can export your feedbots to a local OPML file on your hard drive, or you can have mySyndicaat host that OPML for you. In the latter case mySyndicaat in fact creates Reading List of its own.
Impressed with mySyndicaat's functionality as so many others before me, an evenly important reason for me to stick with mySyndicaat is the extreme dedication to customer satisfaction conveyed by Giovanni Guardalben (CEO) and Massimiliano Farnea (head developer). One issue I had a few weeks ago, where duplicate items were not removed from the final output, was resolved within several days. Replies to support requests are always prompt and to the point.
Most of my RSSorized friends have heard of mySyndicaat, but they find the user interface a bit daunting. In such cases I quickly put together a River of News feed tailored to that person's needs, just to showcase what you can do with mySyndicaat. My latest one is a River of News feed about Grazr. Creating a feedbot usually takes no more than 15-20 minutes, much less if there's already an OPML available. Working with mySyndicaat becomes a lot more tangible if you can see an example of the final output in front of you.
So, now that you know a bit more about what goes on behind the RSS Tool Vendor News project, I kindly invite you to browse the list, to import the underlying OPML into your feed reader, subscribe to it using BlogBridge, experiment to your heart's content with mySyndicaat and provide me with constructive feedback.
RSS tool vendors: if your feed is missing, or you don't have a team blog yet, then please get your act together and send me your feed.
"The main reason for me to make the switch to mySyndicaat as my
preferred feed mixer is that it is capable of creating feed digests
(so-called feedbots) from Reading Lists, which in fact are dynamic OPML
files hosted on a remote server."
Since I first launched my directory of RSS tool vendor news feeds last September, the list has grown steadily to its current size of almost 200 feeds—an increase of 30% in little over two months. The directory is live on display in a Grazr widget in the sidebar of this blog.
I have learned a lot since my last blog post. When I realized I needed a more powerful service to create feed digests than I had been using so far, I soon discovered the incredible web service mySyndicaat, recommended by several of my online friends.
For those who want to see the meat right up-front: here's the RSS Tool Vendor News stream, displayed using mySyndicaat's own feed stylesheet, the Power Viewer. Click on the image to see the live version of the feed. A list of top tags is displayed in the right-hand column, allowing different ways to navigate the feed.
Sidenote: some feed items (especially those from the PageFlakes team blog) seem to have been published with a publishing date that is not recognized by mySyndicaat. I'll report this, mh.
Dynamic OPML Files The main reason for me to make the switch to mySyndicaat as my
preferred feed mixer is that it is capable of creating feed digests
(so-called feedbots) from Reading Lists, which in fact are dynamic OPML
files hosted on a remote server. Note that I spell Reading Lists with initial capitals to make them stand out from just a list of blogs or just a list of recommended books. I maintain my own Reading Lists as categorized groups of feeds in BlogBridge and synchronize these groups with the BlogBridge server to have
my updates propagated. When a Reading List is updated, anyone
subscribing to it will receive a notification of the changes; any
widget capable of displaying dynamic OPML files will also show the most
recent version immediately. Examples of widget engines with real-time awareness of Reading List updates are Grazr,
OptimalBrowser, BittyBrowser and KozOPMLBrowser.
A Plethora of Features Reviewing mySyndicaat is almost like writing an encyclopedic wiki entry about it: there's so much I'd like to tell you about it. Let me just name a few things that seem useful for those who want to get started creating a River of News feed: the central unit within mySyndicaat is called a feedbot, which is basically the aimed end result of your efforts. In my case my feedbots are River of News feeds from other people's feeds. Each feedbot consists of one or more subscriptions, a notion that refers to a particular action that you would like the feedbot to perform. Examples of subscriptions are OPML files and individual feeds, but there's more.
Even while preparing this post I discovered things I didn't know about mySyndicaat, as it can do much more than just create River of News feeds:
it can generate a feedbot on any topic or name, so-called Ego Feeds a.k.a. Topic Radars, pulling in results from blog search engines and social bookmarking sites
it can generate a feedbot containing inbound links to any url, so-called Buzz Monitors, pulling in results from social search engines
it can generate a feedbot from generic search engines, newspapers and social networks
it lets you scrape RSSless websites
it lets you create your own feeds from scratch
it lets you edit and delete any item and any feed element in your feedbot
Once you get the hang of mySyndicaat, you can export your feedbots to a local OPML file on your hard drive, or you can have mySyndicaat host that OPML for you. In the latter case mySyndicaat in fact creates Reading List of its own.
Impressed with mySyndicaat's functionality as so many others before me, an evenly important reason for me to stick with mySyndicaat is the extreme dedication to customer satisfaction conveyed by Giovanni Guardalben (CEO) and Massimiliano Farnea (head developer). One issue I had a few weeks ago, where duplicate items were not removed from the final output, was resolved within several days. Replies to support requests are always prompt and to the point.
Most of my RSSorized friends have heard of mySyndicaat, but they find the user interface a bit daunting. In such cases I quickly put together a River of News feed tailored to that person's needs, just to showcase what you can do with mySyndicaat. My latest one is a River of News feed about Grazr. Creating a feedbot usually takes no more than 15-20 minutes, much less if there's already an OPML available. Working with mySyndicaat becomes a lot more tangible if you can see an example of the final output in front of you.
So, now that you know a bit more about what goes on behind the RSS Tool Vendor News project, I kindly invite you to browse the list, to import the underlying OPML into your feed reader, subscribe to it using BlogBridge, experiment to your heart's content with mySyndicaat and provide me with constructive feedback.
RSS tool vendors: if your feed is missing, or you don't have a team blog yet, then please get your act together and send me your feed.
Of course I immediately emailed Blogdigger CEO Greg Gershman as soon as
I discovered that the Blogdigger indexes fell behind. Perhaps it takes
him a while to undertake action, but so far I haven't received any
reaction that would explain why this is happening. Maybe I have overlooked something—if so, then please let me
know. Until then, I'm forced to take my blog search feeds away from
Blogdigger. So, what does make up my ideal blog search engine? Here's my quick list:
Blogdigger, the blog search engine I preferred so much for my topic radars because of its extensive set of search qualifiers, heavily disappointed me when I discovered that a Lifehacker post titled IE7 still handles feeds better than Firefox 2.0 didn't show up in one of my "River of News" feeds about RSS Technology. Usually I blame my complex filtering techniques when something like this happens, but this time I was certain that a post that has 'feeds' and 'Firefox' in the post title definitely should have been picked up.
As you can see from the screenshot that I took a few minutes ago, the most recent item in the Blogdigger index for the Lifehacker site is dated September 24th, 2006. This is appalling if you realize that 25 more Lifehacker posts have been published since then. All of these posts appear to have been skipped by the Blogdigger indexing robots.
Of course I immediately emailed Blogdigger CEO Greg Gershman as soon as I discovered that the Blogdigger indexes fell behind. Perhaps it takes him a while to undertake appropriate action, but so far I haven't received any reaction. Maybe I have overlooked something—if so, then please let me know. Until then, I'm forced to take my blog search feeds away from Blogdigger.
Google Blog Search seems an interesting alternative: it features search qualifiers similar to those in Blogdigger and even allows me to filter search results by language—a much coveted feature the lack of which I complained about before in private exchanges with Greg. Another interesting added value of the Google Blog Search index is that it contains links to all posts of the blogs that it parses, meaning that you can search further back than Blogdigger allows. This is especially useful for high-frequency blogs such as Lifehacker. What I also like about Google Blog Search is that you can select a high number of posts in the feeds that it generates: I usually select the ones with 100 items. Blogdigger feeds seem limited to 30 items.
Blogdigger will remain on my radar though: its group search (based on an OPML reading list that you can import) is very useful to extract posts from distinct groups of bloggers, for example the Feedster Top 500 or the BlogBridge Top 100. I will dearly miss Blogdigger's rather unique 'Exclude Feed' option: in the past I used this feature quite a lot to reduce the noise from my search results.
Geek's side note: Google Blog Search has one major disadvantage: it is very demanding about how you structure your search commands: phrases such as "best practice" and "case study" cannot be combined into one inposttitle command. E.g.: inposttitle:"best practice"|"case study" is invalid. Instead you need to repeat the inposttitle command for the second phrase, which is cumbersome if you want to combine several phrases into one search. Conversely Google doesn't seem to object against combining single-keyword queries with that same search qualifier: a simple query like inposttitle:Bloglines|Rojo renders exactly the search results one would expect.
Also note that Google Blog Search does NOT offer keyword stemming like Blogdigger does. This means that Google requires that you specify 'aggregator' and 'aggregators' if you want to find both variants.
So, what does make up my ideal blog search engine? Here's my quick list:
search qualifiers (select by site, tags, categories, title, body, subject, language, author, relative date range, absolute date range, link)
phrase search ("digital camera")
proximity operators ('digital' within n words distance from 'camera')
Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, with their respective symbol representation +, |, -)
keyword highlighting
stemming ('aggregate' will match with 'aggregate', 'aggregates', 'aggregation', 'aggregator', 'aggregators' etc.)
search within results (first make a set, then refine that set with more specific keywords)
named persistent queries (persistent query#1 = 'rss', 'feeds' and 'aggregator'; e.g., run "query#1 AND ('Firefox' OR 'Opera' OR 'Flock')")
query builder (a wizard that shows the available commands with their syntax and examples)
query validation and optimization (tell me about missing quotes, brackets, invalid qualifiers, conflicting commands etc)
extended search string length (a query length of 2000+ chars would be nice)
masking ('news*'—note the asterisk—will match 'news', 'newspaper', 'newsroom', 'newsfeeds', 'newsreader' etc.)
search order prevalence using parentheses, with nesting allowed
exclude individual items and entire blogs/feeds from the search results
report blogs as splogs
RSS output (preferably 60 items or more)
Lastly, it would be nice if I could have an account with a blog search engine. This would then allow me to save the details of my queries so that I can finetune them or reuse portions of them when I return. The next step would be to have my search feeds exported as an OPML file.
I'd be delighted to hear how you create your search feeds,
especially if they're complex. I seem to have been rather late at the
party (again!) in finding out about Windows Live Feed Search as it's not directly visible from the live.com start page. I'll explore this latest kid on the block in more detail next. I already noticed it has a huge set of qualifiers and offers search macros. Until then it makes sense to assume
there are other engines out there that could serve my purpose just as
well as Blogdigger and Google Blog Search have done until now.
Of course I immediately emailed Blogdigger CEO Greg Gershman as soon as
I discovered that the Blogdigger indexes fell behind. Perhaps it takes
him a while to undertake action, but so far I haven't received any
reaction that would explain why this is happening. Maybe I have overlooked something—if so, then please let me
know. Until then, I'm forced to take my blog search feeds away from
Blogdigger. So, what does make up my ideal blog search engine? Here's my quick list:
Blogdigger, the blog search engine I preferred so much for my topic radars because of its extensive set of search qualifiers, heavily disappointed me when I discovered that a Lifehacker post titled IE7 still handles feeds better than Firefox 2.0 didn't show up in one of my "River of News" feeds about RSS Technology. Usually I blame my complex filtering techniques when something like this happens, but this time I was certain that a post that has 'feeds' and 'Firefox' in the post title definitely should have been picked up.
As you can see from the screenshot that I took a few minutes ago, the most recent item in the Blogdigger index for the Lifehacker site is dated September 24th, 2006. This is appalling if you realize that 25 more Lifehacker posts have been published since then. All of these posts appear to have been skipped by the Blogdigger indexing robots.
Of course I immediately emailed Blogdigger CEO Greg Gershman as soon as I discovered that the Blogdigger indexes fell behind. Perhaps it takes him a while to undertake appropriate action, but so far I haven't received any reaction. Maybe I have overlooked something—if so, then please let me know. Until then, I'm forced to take my blog search feeds away from Blogdigger.
Google Blog Search seems an interesting alternative: it features search qualifiers similar to those in Blogdigger and even allows me to filter search results by language—a much coveted feature the lack of which I complained about before in private exchanges with Greg. Another interesting added value of the Google Blog Search index is that it contains links to all posts of the blogs that it parses, meaning that you can search further back than Blogdigger allows. This is especially useful for high-frequency blogs such as Lifehacker. What I also like about Google Blog Search is that you can select a high number of posts in the feeds that it generates: I usually select the ones with 100 items. Blogdigger feeds seem limited to 30 items.
Blogdigger will remain on my radar though: its group search (based on an OPML reading list that you can import) is very useful to extract posts from distinct groups of bloggers, for example the Feedster Top 500 or the BlogBridge Top 100. I will dearly miss Blogdigger's rather unique 'Exclude Feed' option: in the past I used this feature quite a lot to reduce the noise from my search results.
Geek's side note: Google Blog Search has one major disadvantage: it is very demanding about how you structure your search commands: phrases such as "best practice" and "case study" cannot be combined into one inposttitle command. E.g.: inposttitle:"best practice"|"case study" is invalid. Instead you need to repeat the inposttitle command for the second phrase, which is cumbersome if you want to combine several phrases into one search. Conversely Google doesn't seem to object against combining single-keyword queries with that same search qualifier: a simple query like inposttitle:Bloglines|Rojo renders exactly the search results one would expect.
Also note that Google Blog Search does NOT offer keyword stemming like Blogdigger does. This means that Google requires that you specify 'aggregator' and 'aggregators' if you want to find both variants.
So, what does make up my ideal blog search engine? Here's my quick list:
search qualifiers (select by site, tags, categories, title, body, subject, language, author, relative date range, absolute date range, link)
phrase search ("digital camera")
proximity operators ('digital' within n words distance from 'camera')
Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, with their respective symbol representation +, |, -)
keyword highlighting
stemming ('aggregate' will match with 'aggregate', 'aggregates', 'aggregation', 'aggregator', 'aggregators' etc.)
search within results (first make a set, then refine that set with more specific keywords)
named persistent queries (persistent query#1 = 'rss', 'feeds' and 'aggregator'; e.g., run "query#1 AND ('Firefox' OR 'Opera' OR 'Flock')")
query builder (a wizard that shows the available commands with their syntax and examples)
query validation and optimization (tell me about missing quotes, brackets, invalid qualifiers, conflicting commands etc)
extended search string length (a query length of 2000+ chars would be nice)
masking ('news*'—note the asterisk—will match 'news', 'newspaper', 'newsroom', 'newsfeeds', 'newsreader' etc.)
search order prevalence using parentheses, with nesting allowed
exclude individual items and entire blogs/feeds from the search results
report blogs as splogs
RSS output (preferably 60 items or more)
Lastly, it would be nice if I could have an account with a blog search engine. This would then allow me to save the details of my queries so that I can finetune them or reuse portions of them when I return. The next step would be to have my search feeds exported as an OPML file.
I'd be delighted to hear how you create your search feeds,
especially if they're complex. I seem to have been rather late at the
party (again!) in finding out about Windows Live Feed Search as it's not directly visible from the live.com start page. I'll explore this latest kid on the block in more detail next. I already noticed it has a huge set of qualifiers and offers search macros. Until then it makes sense to assume
there are other engines out there that could serve my purpose just as
well as Blogdigger and Google Blog Search have done until now.
"My "River of News (by bloggers)" feed from the RSS Tool Vendor News project,
which collects posts from the blogosphere about RSS tools and RSS
technology, all of a sudden looks very different and, in a way, even
mesmerizing when displayed using NewzBubble."
Creative ways have been devised to visualize RSS feeds in the past. In Visualising RSS: playing with WizaRSS and S5 Pascal Van Hecke lined out how to create step-by-step, web-based tutorials from RSS feeds, we've all seen tag clouds of various shapes, colors and sizes, and now there's NewzBubble , a free service that displays an animated representation of the keywords used in any feed.
Adblock
My "River of News (by bloggers)" feed from the RSS Tool Vendor News project, which collects posts from the blogosphere about RSS tools and RSS technology, all of a sudden looks very different and, in a way, even mesmerizing when displayed using NewzBubble.
Creating a buzz cloud like this is pretty simple and doesn't require signing up:
"My "River of News (by bloggers)" feed from the RSS Tool Vendor News project,
which collects posts from the blogosphere about RSS tools and RSS
technology, all of a sudden looks very different and, in a way, even
mesmerizing when displayed using NewzBubble."
Creative ways have been devised to visualize RSS feeds in the past. In Visualising RSS: playing with WizaRSS and S5 Pascal Van Hecke lined out how to create step-by-step, web-based tutorials from RSS feeds, we've all seen tag clouds of various shapes, colors and sizes, and now there's NewzBubble , a free service that displays an animated representation of the keywords used in any feed.
Adblock
My "River of News (by bloggers)" feed from the RSS Tool Vendor News project, which collects posts from the blogosphere about RSS tools and RSS technology, all of a sudden looks very different and, in a way, even mesmerizing when displayed using NewzBubble.
Creating a buzz cloud like this is pretty simple and doesn't require signing up:
"The idea behind this project is to have one single page where anyone
with an interest in RSS technology can get the latest news: feature
announcements, version releases, reviews, blog posts and any other bit
of news—as long as it is related to RSS. It's the most complex piece of
newsmastering I've taken on so far, not just because I wanted to get
feeds from the vendors themselves, but also because I wanted to exclude
search result noise as much as possible."
I proudly present RSS Tool Vendor News, a collection of approximately 150 news feeds from RSS tool vendors. This is a dynamic reading list, which means that it is continually
updated. As with my other project RSSonate, I use BlogBridge, FeedDigest and Grazr to accomplish the results. Some of the feeds are created using Blogdigger or a feed-filtering service.
A couple of notes about my selection criteria: I only include
feeds in English and only if they fit within the scope of the list. For
example: if the majority of the posts turns out to be not RSS-related,
then I don't see much use in keeping the feed on the list. Feeds that
grow stale may eventually be removed. I did not ask permission up-front
from each vendor to include their feeds. If you prefer that I remove
yours, please .
The idea behind this project is to have one single page where anyone
with an interest in RSS technology can get the latest news: feature
announcements, version releases, reviews, blog posts and any other bit
of news—as long as it is related to RSS. It's the most complex piece of
newsmastering I've taken on so far, not just because I wanted to get
feeds from the vendors themselves, but also because I wanted to exclude
search result noise as much as possible.
I decided to publish about this project while it's still very
much in progress, so that I could adjust my vision based on feedback
that I will hopefully get. Feel free to email me with submissions, corrections and omissions.
Suggestions for improvements are welcome too.
Note how you can alter the display of the Grazr widget into a classic three-pane aggregator by clicking on the controls in the top-right corner.
Unfortunately, not all RSS tool vendors provide some kind of feed: as far as I can tell the following vendors / publishers do not offer a company blog, a development news feed or any other channel of their own writing:
Please if you have the url to a feed for any of these vendors.
Update 2006-11-05: the River of News feed for all vendors is now in place. It splices all of the feeds into one huge feed. I created it using MySyndicaat and it's listed at the top the way it used to be. You may have noticed that I also force newly discovered feeds to appear at the top, so that you can quickly see what's new. The feeds are now properly sorted too. Thanks to several vendors who have supplied me with their feeds. I will keep maintaining the list of missing and malfunctioning feeds.
On my list of to do items are currently:
Add another River of News feed with blog posts discussing RSS in general or any of the products mentioned in the digest. These posts are retrieved from blog search engines like Blogdigger using an extensive keyword filter. (Work in progress, relies on bug fix in FeedDigest)
"The idea behind this project is to have one single page where anyone
with an interest in RSS technology can get the latest news: feature
announcements, version releases, reviews, blog posts and any other bit
of news—as long as it is related to RSS. It's the most complex piece of
newsmastering I've taken on so far, not just because I wanted to get
feeds from the vendors themselves, but also because I wanted to exclude
search result noise as much as possible."
I proudly present RSS Tool Vendor News, a collection of approximately 150 news feeds from RSS tool vendors. This is a dynamic reading list, which means that it is continually
updated. As with my other project RSSonate, I use BlogBridge, FeedDigest and Grazr to accomplish the results. Some of the feeds are created using Blogdigger or a feed-filtering service.
A couple of notes about my selection criteria: I only include
feeds in English and only if they fit within the scope of the list. For
example: if the majority of the posts turns out to be not RSS-related,
then I don't see much use in keeping the feed on the list. Feeds that
grow stale may eventually be removed. I did not ask permission up-front
from each vendor to include their feeds. If you prefer that I remove
yours, please .
The idea behind this project is to have one single page where anyone
with an interest in RSS technology can get the latest news: feature
announcements, version releases, reviews, blog posts and any other bit
of news—as long as it is related to RSS. It's the most complex piece of
newsmastering I've taken on so far, not just because I wanted to get
feeds from the vendors themselves, but also because I wanted to exclude
search result noise as much as possible.
I decided to publish about this project while it's still very
much in progress, so that I could adjust my vision based on feedback
that I will hopefully get. Feel free to email me with submissions, corrections and omissions.
Suggestions for improvements are welcome too.
Note how you can alter the display of the Grazr widget into a classic three-pane aggregator by clicking on the controls in the top-right corner.
Unfortunately, not all RSS tool vendors provide some kind of feed: as far as I can tell the following vendors / publishers do not offer a company blog, a development news feed or any other channel of their own writing:
Please if you have the url to a feed for any of these vendors.
Update 2006-11-05: the River of News feed for all vendors is now in place. It splices all of the feeds into one huge feed. I created it using MySyndicaat and it's listed at the top the way it used to be. You may have noticed that I also force newly discovered feeds to appear at the top, so that you can quickly see what's new. The feeds are now properly sorted too. Thanks to several vendors who have supplied me with their feeds. I will keep maintaining the list of missing and malfunctioning feeds.
On my list of to do items are currently:
Add another River of News feed with blog posts discussing RSS in general or any of the products mentioned in the digest. These posts are retrieved from blog search engines like Blogdigger using an extensive keyword filter. (Work in progress, relies on bug fix in FeedDigest)
