A while back, I decided to try evectors RssDistller tool to start pulling any site into my news aggregator. I had some problems getting it installed, but the evectors folks came up with a solution mighty quick. I then tried to RSS-ify sites such as The Handheld Librarian, Librarian.net, New this Week at the Librarians' Index to the Internet, LIS News, and some of the library trade journals, but I couldn't get things to work correctly. So I gave up for a few days until I had more time.
However today, Paolo prods me forward and expands my world by setting up a couple of the sample feeds I'd mentioned so that I can import them directly into my Radio aggregator. To see why I tout news aggregators as the greatest thing since chocolate met peanut butter, take a gander at his screenshots of ALA headlines and LII What's New! This is the future, my friends! Combine your own hand-picked sites with national headlines and local headlines and you've got a good kind of filtering going on.
So I will definitely be working on fully implementing RssDistiller in Radio this week. I can't wait to get home tonight and try it! Maybe I'll even have some time to do documentation for it at some point (although, the next couple of weeks are crazy busy so we'll see).
Paolo also plants the seeds for another interesting discussion about RSS and news aggregators. He asks, "how do sitemasters of these sites feel about being RSS-ified by somebody without their permission? My take is that this is ok as long as you don't make the feeds that you extract available to others for subscription. Is this just another 'personal use' issue?"
I agree with him, since I used to go around the web and visit every site every day anyway. Bringing the content they are already posting into one place that I can check regularly makes me far more efficient. The content is the same, so I don't think the RSS-ee should be upset since the content is still getting out there. In fact, even making your extracted feeds to others is just another distribution channel of the same content, so I personally don't see where that should be a problem. However, I recognize my bias here so maybe that's a discussion we should start. Should you at least notify someone when you scrape their site this way?
I'd be interested to hear what you think about this. [The Shifted Librarian]
3:43:51 PM 
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