mysyndicaat turbo-charges rss/atom

on its webpage, mysyndicaat says it is "a web-based software solution aimed at supporting news professionals in their daily tasks of content collection, filtering, monitoring and content delivery." while it's a professional tool, they explain that they will provide it free to individuals and non-commercial organizations. mysyndicaat is a souped up rss/adam aggregator.

i've liked this tool from the day i found it. it allows very fine control of a large amount of information.  for personal use i created a 'feedbot' that pulls just a few pertinent posts from each of numerous learning related blogs.  in my work on learning circuits blog,  i recently created, with some help from cocomment, a feedbot that gathers together the comments made to 23 posts on different blogs that have linked tp a post in lcb's the big question feature and aggregates them into one, reverse-chronology list which can be viewed publically here.

feedbots can be organized however you find helpful (topic, time period, people, etc.). once aggregated, the feeds in a bot can be filtered by tags, categories, author, and/or any text string found in the posts. a feature i particularly like is the ability to combine similar tags from different sources.  let's say jay cross uses the tag "blog,"  tony karrer uses "blogs,"  and nancy white prefers "weblogs." i can tell mysyndicaat to re-tag any of their posts tagged with their individual tags to a combined tag that i like - "blogging."  into one tag.

getting control of information is going to be one of the biggest challenges to learning in the future.  having an rss/atom aggregator that you can fine tune and assure you are only recieving the exact information you need is going to be vital.  mysyndicaat is such an aggregator today.

for more information on mysyndicaat, please  see my full review of this app in eelearning wiki (the password is learning.)

Comments

[Nancy White]

Hm, great pointers and I appreciate that you shared HOW you use the tool. I think this is an incredibly important practice. This is how I started using Netvibes. When I saw it by myself, I did not see the utility. When I watched my friend Bev Traynor use it - in a way I had not imagined -- all of a sudden it became very useful. (She uses it to bring together sets of feeds and urls via tags. She is a tag-diva!)