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If you’re going to syndicate, Syndicate!

December 27, 2007 at 17:02 | Print This Post Print This Post

It’s annoying as heck to have to subscribe to a publication’s entire RSS feed to get the content produced by only one of its writers, particularly when they publish different work in different publications. If you’re the talent, and you’re drawing an audience on your own, you ought to be able to splice into one feed your content from wherever it happens to appear. I want to read everything that Hitchens and Steyn and Dickerson and Coyne etc. write, even if I don’t particularly care for whatever else their various publications are publishing. Dang - this should be easier.


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6 Responses to “If you’re going to syndicate, Syndicate!”


  1. Ryan Coleman (4 comments.)
    December 27th, 2007 at 18:24

    Have you tried using Google Alerts? You could try creating an alert for the authors full name (in quotes) and then subscribe to the RSS feed for that results page. You may get the odd false positive but more often than not any time they publish something online that credits them you’ll get it (albeit just a preview paragraph)

    - ryan


  2. Kevin OKeefe (5 comments.)
    December 27th, 2007 at 19:11

    That’s the problem for a man wise before his times Rob. You see things that others see no value for.

    We’re playing with that on the LexBlog blogs - by author, by category, and by tag.

    Problem is 99.99999% of Internet users have no idea what separate RSS feed functionality is. The good side is that power users of content like yourself who amplify a bloggers message do understand. As blog developers and publishers we ought to be making things as user friendly as possible for the power users - they are the ones who carry the water for bloggers.


  3. Rob Hyndman (318 comments.)
    December 27th, 2007 at 21:45

    It’s a great idea, Ryan, but execution seems to leave something to be desired - a lot of unrelated stuff gets in, maybe because the writers themselves seem to get written about rather a lot. It would probably help if Hitchens didn’t drink and make a spectacle of himself so damned much. Just kidding. Sort of.


  4. Oleg Branin (1 comments.)
    December 28th, 2007 at 16:24

    Rob,

    You could try our site - http://www.radarfarms.com and our tool: Radar Wizard, which is in way similar to Google Alerts, but aggregates basically all types of Web content: articles, blogs, message boards, books, video, audio, etc.

    It is extremely easy-to-use - just type keyword you would like to use to specify your digest (e.g., Hitchens) and the digest (we call it a news radar) will be created. At the same time, the tool allows to filter in whatever you want - for instance, everything related to Hitchens in cnn.com feeds and filter out all the noise. You could also keep adding more granular subjects to your digest/radar - for instance,
    “Love Poverty and War : Journeys and Essays” or “Why Orwell Matters”.

    If you need any help, just let us know and we’ll be more than happy to provide you with more signal and less noise :-)


  5. Rob Hyndman (318 comments.)
    December 28th, 2007 at 19:04

    True enough, Kevin - it’s taking a while to get these skills out there. I think this one’s pretty important for individual publishers.


  6. Rob Hyndman (318 comments.)
    December 30th, 2007 at 15:12

    Very cool, Oleg. Will check it out.