Friday, November 25th, 2005, 6:44 pm
Syndicating News
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OR the past 4 months I have been syndicating 7 distinct news feeds. The feeds contain search results for keywords of interest, which pertain to computer vision. I syndicate from a couple of sources, which makes the scope even broader; the total number of feeds is 14 at present.
I needed to keep myself regularly informed about developments in computer vision. That field is not only important to my research. It it also serves some required content, which enables me to extend The Computer Vision Digest. For the task of news ‘digestion’, I have been using RSS feeds from Google News and Yahoo! News. Both merely serve as aggregators, encapsulating and centralising news from agencies from all around the world, niches included.
As much as I respect and even fancy Google, I am disappointed with their news service. I am almost reluctant to say that their news aggregation is filled with (if not plagued by) commercial sites that attempt to sell stuff rather than provide news items. It is not only implied by the .com suffix, but also by content, which is glaringly promotional. This is of course a real deterrent, which becomes appalling at times. Others have noticed similar issues, so it is not a matter of coincidence, but a recurring pattern. I have come to take every link that spot in Google News with a grain of salt. Rather often it leads me to what can only be described as news spam — an attempt at sales that is shrewdly disguised as a news item.
To syndicate news, import any of the following templates into your feeds reader. Replace KEYWORD1 and KEYWORD2 with keywords of interest and isolate keywords using a plus (the + symbol).
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=KEYWORD1+KEYWORD2&ie=UTF-8&output=rss
http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=KEYWORD1+KEYWORD2&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt
This time, for a change, my warm recommendation goes to Yahoo. They simple manage to isolate real news from the ‘noise’.
Related items on feed-based services:
