Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Types of RSS Feeds
So far we've been looking at where you can ind static RSS feeds—RSS feeds
that Web sites make available to provide information about their site or
about certain sections of their site. And these static feeds are very useful.
But your secret weapon as an information trapper is not the static feed, but
the keyword-based feed.
his section is all about the “So what?” I discussed earlier in the chapter.
Which type of RSS feed you use can save you gobs and gobs of time and
make you look like an information-gathering wizard!
Static feeds
Static feeds are just what they sound like: feeds a site ofers that you can't
customize with keywords—what we've been talking about up to this point
in the chapter. A site may have one static feed available, or hundreds. My
Web site ResearchBuzz (researchbuzz.org/wp) has a couple of main feeds
with the potential for a feed for each category, which amounts to over 200
feeds—but they're all static. Static feeds are not the customizable timesavers
that keyword-based feeds are, but they're essential to providing you with
general overviews of a topic, or for providing you with information when
your interests are too broad for a keyword search.
Static feeds are your starting point. You build your monitoring process by
irst setting a few information traps of general interest to make sure you get
a full sweep of the topic you're interested in. However, you don't want to set
too many! he idea is to create a manageable low of information, which you
can ilter and redirect in whatever way you need.
Keyword-based feeds
Keyword-based feeds are feeds that are generated based on a search. his
search can be done on any resource (most people do them on news search
engines). he advantage is that you can create your own feeds based on the
keywords you're interested in, feeds that are as narrowly focused as you
like. Although most likely you can ind RSS feeds that broadly address the
topic you're interested in, a keyword-based RSS feed can help you coax out
narrowly focused information. he rest of this chapter talks about where to
ind keyword-based feeds and what to do with them once you ind them.
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