Trapping Topic-Based Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 138

Managing Keyword-Searchable RSS Feeds
I spend a lot of time in this topic talking about RSS feeds, and hopefully at
this point you're as enthusiastic about them as I am. Okay, that may be a
little too much to ask. But hopefully you ind them as interesting as I do.
RSS feeds are one thing. But the next level beyond that—the next idea—is
keyword-based feeds. Keyword-based feeds, as you might remember, are
feeds based on searches on the query words that you specify. So instead of
very general feeds—all the national news from CNN, for example—you can
get feeds for just the town or the mayor of the town, or even the mayor's
favorite hobby.
Having RSS feeds that are very speciically focused on just the topics in
which you're interested will, as you might imagine, save you a lot of time
when you're checking your information traps. On the other hand, when you
decide that you want to generate and use many keyword-based RSS feeds,
you run into another problem: how to eiciently generate keyword-based
RSS feeds. he problem is that you end up having to do so many of them.
Take Google News, for example. You might go to Google News and decide
that you want to get three of its general RSS feeds: one for technology, one
for business, and one for science. Compare that to getting keyword-based
RSS feeds. You might decide that there are iteen keyword-based RSS feeds
that would be relevant and useful to your topic. So you'd have to run each
of those iteen searches and save them as an RSS feed. Now multiply those
iteen searches by every resource that ofers keyword-based RSS feeds, and
you'd spend an astonishing amount of time just setting up the feeds. I have
attempted to solve that problem with a tool called Kebberfegg.
Using Kebberfegg
Kebberfegg, which you can ind at kebberfegg.com, is a free service that
attempts to make it very easy to set up keyword-based RSS feeds across
many resources—over 3 dozen as of this writing ( Figure 7.17 ). You can
view your generated feeds as a plain HTML list, or you may get them as an
OPML ile that you can import into an RSS feed reader. (hink of an OPML
ile as a bookmark ile for RSS feed readers.)