I spent a good chunk of the past weekend playing with reBlog, an extremely clever tool put together by the fine folks at Eyebeam R&D. reBlog is a tool designed to let you produce an edited weblog that aggregates and reposts content from other blogs. While this form of linkblogging is pretty far from what I do on this blog, it’s something that’s interested me deeply for Global Voices and Blog Africa, both of which – to one extent or another – are edited linkblogs.
I’ve started a (very lightly edited) reBlog of some of my favorite African blogs. I’ve capped my list at fifty blogs for now, because I’m starting to see reFeed (the part of the reBlog tool that retrieves my subscriptions) having some problems with the amount of time it takes to retrieve all 50 feeds. Basically, I’m using reBlog to retrieve posts from these fifty blogs once or twice a day, and selectively publishing those that I think will be of interest to readers who want to follow the African blogosphere. (For the most part, I’m republishing all posts that actually apply to Africa, not just to the author’s personal life. And I’m doing a bit of editing on the highest volume weblogs I subscribe to.)
The resulting linkblog (also available as an RSS feed) is a little different from BlogAfrica, the reblogging site I’ve helped my friends at AllAfrica run for the past year or so. BlogAfrica is an opt-in system – we only aggregate bloggers who choose to join. Unfortunately, the tools we’re using don’t support Atom well, which is a huge problem as many of Africa’s best bloggers use Blogger, which doesn’t output an RSS feed (grr…) So it reflects a different subset of the African blogosphere than this new aggregator.
The tool isn’t perfect – the authors are working out a few kinks in the module that lets one display these blogs through a WordPress server, so I’m currently just using the output of the reFeed tool. And there are a few more features I’d really like:
– NewsILike offers the ability to subscribe to a feed, run it through a regular expression engine and match only the posts that contain certain keywords. It’s a cool feature, especially if you’re following things like mainstream media feeds and you only want to match stories that mention Africa.
– Bloglines, for all its faults, handles hierarchies of subscriptions well, letting me categorize feeds into countries (though not into regions). It would be great to have an aggregator that could do aggregation and produce feeds for arbitrary subsets of feeds.
– To use reBlog for an application like BlogAfrica, I’d need a way to allow users to suggest (their or others) blogs for inclusion, preferably in a way that an author could approve or reject them in batches. I could write a simple script to generate an OPML file that could be imported into the application, but I think it would be cool to have a “suggestions” feature added to the tool.
But hey, the fact that I’m sitting here brainstorming features makes me think I’m likely to actually use this thing. And I think a future version of Global Voices which used reBlog feeds to aggregate countries and regions, then featured the best posts on the main blog would be a powerful resource for people who want to follow local and regional blogospheres in detail.
Great work, Ethan. Here’s what I use for http://planet.tezeta.org/ (Blogs on East Africa)
http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/
Awasu is an aggregator that can do the kind of thing you’re looking for. There is already a plugin available that takes feeds from multiple sources and combines them into a single feed:
http://www.awasu.com/downloads/ThirdParty/CombineFeeds/
We’re also putting the finishing touches on a new feature that lets you run searches on your feed content and return the results as a feed. From there, it’s easy to publish that feed online. Awasu’s extensible plugin architecture means that you can do a lot of customization and add extra functionality to not only your channels but the aggregator itself.
I’ve had a long interest in the developing world and the use of IT there (http://www.awasu.com/weblog/?p=170 and http://www.awasu.com/weblog/?p=175, amongst others) and would be very interested in getting Awasu involved with the work you’re doing here.
Cheers
Taka
Thanks for these Ethan – will give them a try – btw when do we get off our computers?
Any suggestions on an adequate tool that can be customized to do the following:
– Displays three page tabs, chronological, categorical, popular.
– Works as an aggregator to a list of feeds. Blog names and post titles on the side in chronological order by post date, and post content in the body. This is the main tab page, chronological.
– From the chronological page, readers pitch in by voting for posts.
– Posts get points with every vote, readers get to give 1 to 5 points to each post. Posts lose points over time.
– The popular page tab lists the most popular posts by votes, ordered by points.
– When readers vote for posts, they can also categorize posts, to be displayed in the categories tab page with under their category.
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