One of the biggest problems for professional researchers is the one that’s getting more difficult all the time–how to cut through the noise and chatter on the Web and zero in on the most credible, substantive, and trusted blogs and news sources.
Two sites that I like very much that can help here are Rollyo and Feed Rinse.
The former is a “roll your own search engine” site, introduced last fall, where you can designate which URLs on the Web to restrict a search to. It’s a nice way to run a search just on those sites you like and trust. It’s not a totally new concept, but is nicely executed here. According to Danny Sullivan, of SearchEngineWatch, “Under the hood, Rollyo is tapping into Yahoo and refining it.”
The other site, Feed Rinse, is for your RSS feeds, and lets you restrict your incoming feeds based on keywords or phrases you designate, that appear in the text, title, author or other fields. Some RSS readers have this keyword filtering built in, but not all, and Feed Rinse does provide some nice advanced keyword limit protocols.
The May issue of The Information Advisor will have a detailed article on strategies, sites and sources for overcoming Web 2.0 type information overload.
Technorati Tags: Rollyo
Technorati Tags: Feed Rinse
Technorati Tags: Information Overload
RSS Feeds
I’ve summarised a couple of alternative approaches to Rollyo etc., built around the idea of search hubs such as delicious feeds, or the links on aparticualr page, in a blog post here.
tony
Comment by Tony Hirst — April 5, 2006 @ 3:12 pm
I would like to invite you to check out zaptxt.com. It’s an RSS filtering and notification application that I wrote about a year ago. For each RSS feed I can specify keywords (by using Boolean logic) that I am interested in and the program will ping the feed every so often and, if it finds that the new RSS post contains my search keywords, it will send me a notification via email or SMS or IM. There’s no limit to the amount of filters you can setup (there’s also an option to filter an OPML file). I would appreciate if you checked out zaptxt.com and let me know what you think.
Comment by eduard — April 5, 2006 @ 6:08 pm
I’d also like to invite you to check out the beta of Blog Verticals. It offers blog aggregation and filtering. Please let me know what you think!
Eduard, sounds like you have a good idea, too. I’ll go check it out.
Comment by Mike — April 13, 2006 @ 12:22 pm