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Figuring out News Search Feeds

March 17, 2004 By Will Richardson

Jeremy Hiebert is starting to see what I see about search feeds:

The idea is this: if students created a planning portfolio that contained their interests, plans and results of various activities they had done, couldn’t we infer that they might be interested in a few very targeted online resources that related to those interests and plans? So I imagined that I’m in Grade 12 and I’m planning to take biology at Brown University next year. Would this custom feed interest me enough to want to keep coming back to check it occasionally?

Exactly my thinking. And for as much as I see this as a natural classroom research tool, I feel it would be even more effective as a tool for teachers to stay abreast of current events that might be relevant to the curriculum or to their own professional development. (I’ve been doing some more playing around with this idea for teachers who may not want to go the full aggregator route.) What we need is one search tool that covers blogs, news sources, Websites, and news groups all in one and spits out RSS feeds. I know that probably would kick out a whole bunch of stuff, but I’d really like to have the chance to tweak the search to see if I could make it specific enough to be manageable. That is the key to all of this, obviously: the ability to make the vast majority of the results relevant. It won’t work if over half of it is random blather.

Filed Under: General, RSS

Comments

  1. Tom Hoffman says

    March 17, 2004 at 10:32 am

    You’re selling me on these search feeds, too. I don’t feel like I need them personally, but teachers and probably students aren’t going to be scanning 125 carefully selected weblogs daily, so searches will be more useful to them.

    Does Manila store the items in the incoming RSS feed in its database?

    It would be nice to store permanantly the items that were frequently selected or perhaps scored well on a feedback system (“check this box to save this item”)

  2. Jeremy says

    March 17, 2004 at 11:20 am

    Bob from PubSub sent me the link to their site: http://www.pubsub.com/

    It seems like they’re moving in the direction you’re talking about, although it’s focusing on searching blogs and newsgroups first. There’s always the issue with the quantity/quality ratios in any of these feeds — I thought Stephen’s edu_RSS was a really cool idea, but there was no way I could keep up with the volume of material supplied.

  3. Will R. says

    March 17, 2004 at 11:41 am

    Tom, if there is a way to create an easy, fill in the blank and generate a rssBox type result on the page…that would really be cool.

  4. Will R. says

    March 17, 2004 at 11:41 am

    Jeremy…I looked at PubSub a while ago and played with some of their feeds but wasn’t impressed. I may have to go back and take another look. Thanks.

  5. Tom Hoffman says

    March 17, 2004 at 1:20 pm

    Will,
    Do you mean a form to add columns or boxes as in your example?

    There is some prior art in Plone for doing similar things, but I haven’t sorted it all out.

    I don’t like the separate boxes for each feed though. It only scales up to five or ten feeds. I think the Radio style of mixing the feeds together in one column in simpler even for small numbers of feeds and scales more smoothly into the 20 – 30 feed range.

  6. Will R. says

    March 17, 2004 at 4:47 pm

    For some reason, I just don’t like the Radio/Manila style. If you have a few search feeds that you’re aggregating onto a page, I think it would get too confusing. I know I like to read all of your posts together, then all of Tim’s, then whoever else. It feels too disjointed when they come in by time instead of source.

  7. Tom Hoffman says

    March 17, 2004 at 10:30 pm

    Yeah, it is a matter of taste to a certain extent, but doing a box for each feed gets into pretty serious layout issues really quickly, unless you’ve got a really long front page like Slashdot. If you’re going to take up the whole page anyhow, you’ll need to do something like Bloglines if you don’t want one big column.

    Anyway, here’s a thing to do multi-column layout of dynamic boxes in Zope, although I haven’t played with it yet:

    http://www.mxm.dk/products/public/mxmDynamicPage/

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