Been doing some more thinking about and playing with the search feeds that I noted before. I dropped a couple of viewRssBox macros into a page on my library site, one a Google search and the other a Google news search on the word “Holocaust.” I showed the page to my Social Studies Supervisor, and he was impressed. I orginally had a Feedster search feed there too, but he was concerned about the appropriateness of what might show up in that one.
Now comes along PubSub which is another service that will generate an RSS feed for search results done on Weblogs in their database. And they do some other neat stuff like do real-time tracking of how many times the presidential candidates are mentioned on the blogs they follow. (Nice chart!) Check out their quick sub list of election feeds. (I swear the way this race is shaping up, it’s going to be a very intense year for me. And it’s going to get harder and harder not to blog about politics…)
Anyway, I’m going to try to work up some easy cut and paste templates for teachers who might want to create a couple of these boxes for their students or themselves. They could potentially build a pretty interesting automatically updated class specific newspaper for whatever they are studying. (Makes me wish I was still teaching my Media Literacy class.) And I’m thinking the library might want to just create them at the request of teachers as resource sites for certain timely topics.
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