In my post Crowdsourcing News Du ‘Jour last week I displayed a series of links and summaries culled from blogs and Web sites that included mentions of the term "crowdsourcing."
On the face of it, this may seem unimpresssive. After all, it is just some text with links based on a search term. It doesn’t look that interesting. Many people post favorite links of the day. So what is so special here?
Through the miracles of RSS and a hosted newsmastering solution called MySyndicaat I can:
- Get results back for my search term(s) of choice from myriad sources including the major news and blog sites and search engines.
- Aggregate these results in a master RSS "feedbot"
- Schedule update intervals for the feebot down to 15 minutes, so that the news is always fresh
- Set retention parameters
- Automatically remove duplicate and spam posts
- Manually edit the results if I wish
- Make the results available as an RSS feed, email, text, and/or in HTML news digest format
- Present the results in a news section of my blog or Web site or use the results as an internal PR results tracking or buzz monitoring device
That is what is special! In short, newsmastering automates what is otherwise a very time consuming and manual process.
