Connection Café: Can your RSS do this?

	Can your RSS do this?
	Posted by Tompkins Spann at Apr 21, 2008 01:22 AM CDT Categories: Technology

RSS is very cool. Why? Because it strips website content down to the bare bones and publishes it with a series instructions in a readable format that more and more web applications can interpret and reuse.

During a particularly long work conference call the other day (sorry boss) my mind began to wander and I decided to test a theoretical use of RSS.

What if I could somehow republish my favorite articles that I've collected across the internet to a website for others to see. In about 30 minutes I figured it out and then made the video below (the video took me considerably longer than 30 minutes :)

Warning: the audio is grainy and also a bit corny.

Here's what I did:

First I have collected hundreds of RSS feeds from various websites and use Google Reader to follow them (gotta love gReader)
Then I "shared" the articles in gReader that I think others would be interested in reading.
gReader creates a new RSS output of my shared items but the gReader output includes a mix of lots of topics
So I used Yahoo! Pipes to add content filters to the shared items list, then Pipes created a NEW RSS feed for my filtered list
I then took that RSS feed and inserted into the Convio CMS RSS Reader component
I also created a display template with basic HTML to format what and how I want to view my RSS feed
Save, Publish, and Voila! I have now published a list of the most pertinent items from my shared list for others to peruse.

RSS is so cool.

Anyone got ideas or examples for how nonprofits might "mashup" a series of RSS feeds and republish the content?