I am a big believer in the power of RSS. So much so that I started an RSS video series on this blog. It is one of the cornerstones of the current generation of Web technologies, and it’s now easy to find RSS feeds on a wide range of sites and services.
To work with these feeds, most people use readers like Google Reader or portal sites Netvibes or Pageflakes. Google Reader lets people browse through the feeds they subscribe to as either individual sources or as commingled headlines. Pageflakes and Netvibes present the feeds in widget based frameworks, with each source appearing as an individual widget that can be positioned anywhere on user configurable pages.
These are all great tools except for one thing.
None of them are designed to scale up…
Each of these tools will do a good job managing less than 100 feeds, and could probably work reasonably well with twice that number. The most aggressive feed user I know, blogger Robert Scobble, manages to have over 600 feeds in his Google Reader. He ends up doing a quick scan through the 1300 headlines a day he gets to pluck out those few he thinks he should actually read. And while I know he does an incredible finding little tech nuggets to write about, I’m sure there are a lot of things he ends up missing – people just can’t effectively screen through that many sources and that many discrete pieces of information manually.
And compared to the vastness of the web, 600 sources seems like a pretty small number…
In my interview with Wallstrip, I talked a little about my company’s product, infoNgen. InfoNgen was designed specifically to handle these types of scale issues with RSS.
Our free version of InfoNgen is a new type of web based feed reader. It offers a hybrid widget/headline interface combined with a powerful semantic tagging engine in the backend to let us ‘understand’ what each individual story is about. The basic service comes with a directory of over 15,000 handpicked and organized feeds (and growing). You can turn any of them off that you don’t think are useful to you, and also add any additionals ones you’d like to have. You can also screen feeds by language – the feeds in our directory represent multiple languages and come from sources authored around the globe.
Continuously throughout the day, each individual feed is crawled, and the full text of each story in it is analyzed and classified using a broad yet detailed financial taxonomy. Because we provide these traditionally unstructured sources with rich tagging, you’re able to do a lot more with InfoNgen than just browse through feed headlines or perform basic text searches.
InfoNgen gives you the ability to read across all of your sources in aggregate using very detailed filtering. You can see what’s happening with individual companies, specific industries, or even regions. You can filter what you see further using topic based screens like ‘Management Changes’ or ‘Unusual Dividends’. You can also choose to look only at stories based on the type of source – blogs, technical publications, or local new papers for instance.
You get to focus on just the things you care about without all the noise…
I’ll be covering this version InfoNgen in more detail in the next episode of Practical RSS, so I’d encourage you to head over to www.infongen.com and check out the service in advance.
It’s completely free, and I believe you’ll find it to be a valuable tool…
QUICK COMMERCIAL NOTE: A professional version of InfoNgen with customized topics and enhanced searching and alerting features is available on a subscription basis. Contact me through email if you have any questions.
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