Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Blogsieve: Creating a feed river

I have been thinking about wanting/needing this tool for several months, and apparently an innovative team of programmers have now created it: Blogsieve (www.blogsieve.com).

The concept is simple: you have multiple RSS feed sources that you want to monitor, but you want to receive / read / download them as a single stream. This could be great for:

  • A class where you have multiple students blogging, and you want a single feed that shows all the updated blog postings from the class (great when you are not using a CMS system that includes blog tools, but are letting students use different blogging tools of their choice.)
  • A podcast feed from a team of podcasters, for instance if several people are podcasting about a common theme, then you can create a single feed that aggregates / combines all their content, but just subscribe to that one feed.

One nice benefit of this model is that you can add or subscribe individual sub-feeds from the larger feed, and subscribers don’t have to make any modifications to their settings. I think this looks like a GREAT tool, one I have been wanting for some time, and I look forward to testing it in the near future.

One observation I read recently (I think in an article in the Sep05 Wired magazine) is that amateur content creators (bloggers, podcasters) are at a disadvantage compared to old media sources, because by themselves they are limited in the quanity of quality content they can produce. This can be easily addressed by team-blogging and team-podcasting. I predict some team-podcasting in my future…..

Best of all, like so many tools available today, Blogsieve appears to be free!

I created a sample: http://feeds.blogsieve.com/10/RSS2.0. This aggregates 3 of my favorite educational technology podcasts (David Warlick, Bob Sprankle, Room208) plus my own, sorted by date in reversed order (so the most recent is first). Very cool tool. In order for this to work in iTunes (ADVANCED – SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST), however, I had to burn this feed with Feedburner using the smartcast feature: http://feeds.feedburner.com/edtechpodcasts. Not all the podcast links are showing up in iTunes, but they are in feed readers, so I’ll need to troubleshoot this more later…..

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On this day..


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