Aug 25 2006

A feed of blogs

The mechanics are in place, now for the fun part. I’ve been working on setting up a feed for CPsquare members’ blogs. I just checked it to see whether the feed was working correctly, and it was really spectacular! What an amazing bunch of people and work going on!

Of course for the feed to come into existence in the first place required discussions back and forth between Beverly, Andy, and many others inside and outside of CPsquare. And there has been plenty of conversation back and forth all along. For example, Beth Kanter summarizes Nancy White’s links on the subject of blogs for communities.

There is so much diversity that I can’t begin to describe it! The big question is whether the collective noun should be a feed of bloggers or a term that evokes community somewhat. We shall see. To me it’s a reminder of the fact that any new technology like this is another window into a large community that interacts on so many platforms and in so many different ways, face-to-face, by email, by phone, by instant message, on a web board, and now more and more via their blogs.

4 responses so far

4 Responses to “A feed of blogs”

  1. joitske says:

    I subscribed to it, and I like it a lot! Now I’m wondering whether I will unsubscribe from the individual blogs I was subscribed to. I do see them double now, but from the feed it is not always that obvious who has written the post.

    Curious what other do.

  2. Nancy White says:

    John, I’m trying to aggregate a bunch of feeds and have tried to discern what you did. This is what I’m guessing. It would be great if you shared the steps

    1. Find all the blog feeds
    2. Burn each one individually in feedburner
    3. Then what?

  3. Nancy White says:

    Oops, I hit submit too soon.

    what I wanted to know is how you made this…

    http://feeds.feedburner.com/CpsquareMemberBlogs

  4. John.Smith says:

    Nancy,

    The trick was to search around for feed aggregators that would work for more than just a few feeds. I finally settled on:

    http://feeddigest.com/

    To aggregate the 10-15 different feeds, you have to pay an annual fee, which we did (with CPsquare dues funds). If you’re interested, you could look behind the scenes at how it works for CPsquare, since you’re a member.

    So actually they go through feedburner AFTER they’ve been aggregated by feeddigest. I have to say that the process was complicated enough that I didn’t really wade through all the details until after I’d shown a sketch of the strategy to Marshall Kirkpatrick.

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