Social Strategist - Online Strategy & Innovation: Social Strategist Updates and Google Blog Feeds

Social Strategist Updates and Google Blog Feeds · 06/06/2007

I’m currently working on a few post ideas, one of which is a round-up/comparison/analysis of social lending tools, which is taking a while to write due to extra research into the financial aspects. If you have personal experience with these tools or if you’re a master(or even journeyman) of financial knowledge, please leave a comment if you’d like to help out.

I’m also doing more work with RSS editors. The very kind Paul McDonald, a product manager at Google, sent me an invite to try out Google Mashup Editor, and so I’m learning how to use that tool while still experimenting with Pipes, and to a lesser degree, Popfly.

I recently used Pipes to solve a frustration of mine. While Microsoft has a single page with all of their blog feeds, Google’s official blogs are spread across a few dozen individual sites. So I’ve taken 32 feeds of every English-language, non acquired product team(YouTube BLog, BloggerBuzz, etc.) blog I could find, and combined them into one. This has everything from the Google Checkout API blog to the Google Librarian Central blog. I’ve published it as Official Google Blog Feeds. If you find that I’ve missed any, please let me know.

I’ve also done the same with official Yahoo! blog feeds. Leaving out the del.icio.us blog, Flickr blog, Spark Blog, and Upcoming.org news, Yahoo! lists 19 other blogs, 18 of which the provided feeds work, one of which I had to update(Yahoo! Anecdotal apparently started using FeedBurner, and no one told their subscribe page). I’ve published this combined feed as well, as “Official Yahoo! Blog Feeds”.

So why are these useful? Let’s say you’re a developer, or you run a web site for developers about APIs. You can now use a tool like Pipes to receive data from only 3 feeds, the combined Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! feeds, and filter them to show only posts with the keyword “api”. You’ve taken an information firehose and and turned it into a stream of useful content.

More in-depth content coming soon, I hope you’ll subscribe if you haven’t already.

Comment

Hi, Jay:

I edit Yodel Anecdotal and we looked into the issue you said you had with our subscribe page and don’t see anything out of the ordinary. Can you give me further detail? Thanks. Would hate for a feed not to work!

- Nicki

— Nicki Dugan · 06/07/2007 04:31 AM · #
Hi Nicki, thanks for reading!

On the subscribe page, the RSS button points to http://yodel.yahoo.com/feed, but what my browswer auto-detects is http://feeds.feedburner.com/yodelanecdotal.

When I tried to put the former into Pipes, I received a 403 Redirect Error(something like that). So possibly the button on the page redirects fine for anyone using a browser, but in Pipes it gives an error?

Or, possibly, Pipes was just having problems while/after the updates. Hope that helps!

— Jay Neely · 06/07/2007 07:55 AM · #