It’s not as nifty as a cell phone, or as amazing as street views of businesses all over the world, but to me it is big news — really big news. Google announced yesterday
that Google Reader can now be used to monitor pages for Web changes — whether they have RSS feeds or not.
Ten years after I started using RSS, it’s pretty prevalent but not universal. Google’s announcement means it’s going to be a lot easier to follow those random pages that don’t have RSS feeds for update information.
Are you already using the Google Reader for RSS feeds? Adding non-RSS content is easy. Just click on the “Add a Subscription” button and you’ll get a form into which you can paste an RSS feed URL or a regular HTML page URL. Google will ask you to confirm that you would like to create a feed to monitor based on that page.
Now, HTML pages are not RSS feeds. Their information is harder to isolate and delineate. So while the idea is that Google is going to “provide short snippets of page changes,” it’s not clear what those snippets are going to look like. Is going going to get hung up on a date change or counter change? (This has been a problem in the past with software like WebSite Watcher.) Are the snippets going to be meaningful?
I’ve added some pages to Google Reader and will revisit them in a week or so to see what kind of snippets I’m getting as results.
Hat tip to ReadWriteWeb for letting me know about the New York Times’ recent Custom Feeds tool, available at http://prototype.nytimes.com/customFeeds/.
Essentially this tool gives you the ability to create keyword-based RSS feeds for New York Times content, but also enhances that essential idea with a couple of extras.
Here’s a snapshot of the site. First thing you do is enter a topic or keyword in which you’re interested. The tool will suggest other terms based on the keyword you initially entered. (As you can see I entered Washington and the NYT had lots of suggestions for that.) Next you choose which keywords you want to add to your custom feed. (You can add several if you like.) When you enter keywords, the tool will evaluate the feed, testing to see how many articles in the past 30 days include your term(s) (or, if it’s a very active term, how many articles in the last one day included your term(s).) This is AWESOME; you’ll know right away if a feed is going to contain too much/too little content without having to run tests.
Once you have a term or set of terms you like, enter a title for the feed and click the “Subscribe” button. The NYT will kick out a RSS file that has a pretty good snippets from NYT articles as well as the occasional image.
The only thing that even bothered me a little bit about this tool is the fact that you have to enter your own feed titles, which would slow things down if you wanted to create a lot of feeds. Other than that these extras as terrific. Highly recommend this tool.
USA.gov has teamed with with NewsGator to offer an easily-browsable set of RSS feeds at http://news.usa.gov/. This is both feed displayer and content lister, so you don’t have to subscribe to RSS feeds to get some use out of the site.
The different feeds are shown on the left side of the page, and range from General Government and Reference to Consumer News and Recalls to Science and Technology. Pick a feed the left and you’ll see its content on the right as well as a link to get an RSS feed.
Note that these feeds are aggregates — you can see that if you use the pulldown menu to choose to sort the feed by source. The Consumer News and Recall feeds includes posts from The Bureau of Transportation Statistics, CBP.gov, Consumer News from Pueblo, the FDA, and more. (The Consumer News and Recall feed has 32 pages’ worth of items.)
If you don’t want to bother with aggregates there’s a full list of US government RSS feeds at http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/Libraries/RSS_Library.shtml.
Or if you’d rather get US government podcasts, there’s a list of them here: http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/Libraries/Podcasts.shtml.
