categorization

[Julian Bond <julian_bond@voidstar.com>]

There's been some talk on another list and also on a couple of blogs[1]
about aggregating RSS feeds together and then using it to create a new
synthetic feed.

Inspired by this, I added a bit of functionality to Ecademy's news
system[3]. We already collect a 100 or so news feeds and group them into
topics based on the feed source[4]. Drupal's news system already had all
this functionality where by a feed can be given one or more attributes
which are taken from a list of topics each of which has one or more
attributes. The topic display groups news items according to the
attribute matches.

The addition was simple. Just take a topic and write the RSS back out
again for the items in that topic. So now we've got a composite feed
available on (say) "Web Services" made up of 20 source feeds[5].  

Every so often we get to talking about categorization of items and feeds
within the standard. This approach of getting the readers to do the
categorization and pushing back out composite feeds might be a nicely
low tech and distributed way of getting some useful grouping done. 

[1] http://www.looselycoupled.com/blog/2002_06_09_lc.htm#85164156
[3] http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=import
[4] http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=import&op=bundles
[5] http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=import&op=rssbundle&id=12

-- 
Julian Bond Email&MSM: julian.bond@voidstar.com
Webmaster:              http://www.ecademy.com/
Personal WebLog:       http://www.voidstar.com/ 
CV/Resume:          http://www.voidstar.com/cv/
M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173   T: +44 (0)192 0412 433