So…I’m finally getting a chance to catch up on some things and digest a wealth of information from RSS feeds (and tweets). The RSS aggregation site ‘Planet Geospatial’ has culled a number of feeds, and the BlinkGeo blog did not make the cut into the ‘reboot’ version. I never asked for the BlinkGeo feed to be included on the Planet Geospatial site, so there’s really no hard feelings on my end.
RSS aggregation is an interesting concept, and certainly sites like PopURLs and Alltop have proved to be quite popular in the mainstream. PerryGeo has launched Geospatial Reddit, which I think is a great attempt at using a democratic approach to highlight information that is relevant and important for the geospatial community at large–I encourage you to participate (consistently) if you haven’t already. Unfortunately, one of the weaknesses of the Reddit system in general is that there are no RSS feeds (i.e., you cannot subscribe to an RSS feed of Geospatial Reddit).
I tried to use the ‘Geospatial Digg’ approach with BlinkGeo Stories, but ultimately it proved to be less democratic than I hoped–a limited number of folks submitted/voted for stories/posts, and often times people would submit one story (their own post) and move on, without voting (or burying) other stories/posts. I hope Geospatial Reddit has more widespread adoption AND participation, so that the same scenario can be avoided.
As far as RSS aggregation, I think it would be valuable to have more geospatial RSS aggregation sites that are targeted and well balanced. The more the better–I mean it’s just RSS feeds, and you can subscribe/unsubscribe with a single click. One of the main detractors of Planet Geospatial for me is that it is (or was) the only RSS aggregation site for ‘geospatial’ content. A one-stop shop. Pretty binary…
To me it seems weird that there is a perception that putting together an RSS aggregation site is a lot of technical hard work. Is it?
I actually think the tougher issue at hand is putting together a targeted, well-balanced RSS aggregation site–one that doesn’t include a lot of redundancy and one that does address a niche/specialty. I would love to see geospatial aggregation sites (large and small) that provide variety and diversity, even if there is overlap between them (i.e., one RSS aggregation site has one or more of the same RSS feeds as another site). Perhaps each blog could have its own RSS aggregation page that reflects the author’s interests/tastes…
Will BlinkGeo delve into RSS aggregation? Well, I am currently compiling a list of RSS feeds that I think are valuable, and will likely put together an OPML file(s) to share at the least…though don’t be surprised if some RSS aggregation pages also emerge.
Drop me a line if you would like to have your blog potentially included…but yeah, the democratic approach is getting tossed out the window this time around.
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