RSS Mashups & Composite Content

I’ve been looking for a tool to create a curated blog drawing from several feeds to produce a single stream of content. The items in the aggregate feed would be republished with or without commentary or used as a catalog enabling easy assembly of new pieces of content.

This style of authorship is what Jason Calacanis calls metajournalism. In a previous post, I called the work product of this style metacontent. I guess you could say metajournalists produce metacontent. Since we’re making up words here, I’m liking the terminology Composite Content these days. Somehow it just makes reblogging seem less dirty.

Recently Yahoo introduced a new tool, Yahoo Pipes, that aids some in creating composite content. It’s a nifty web-based IDE for creating “pipelines” that merge, transform, and tweak content feeds from any web source. It has some extra delights in that it’s possible to create input parameters to your feed so that it can be customized through a form/URL API. It will be very, very nice if they allow users the right/ability for a community of users to create different widgets that can participate in pipelines. I’d love to have a “digest” block that took an input and produced an output on a fixed schedule (daily). Very cool tool, check it out.

For a while now I’ve been playing with xFruits, a web service that has “bricks” for RSS mashups. It’s fairly limited in what it does being mostly focused on aggregating RSS feeds and transforming content types (RSS-to-PDF, RSS-to-Web). Still, for the more casual user, it’s a lot easier to get in to than Pipes and gives lots of utility out of the box.

Then there’s EyeBeam’s ReBlog tool of course, but this project seems to be inactive. That and I fail to see how this is much different than burning a del.icio.us feed. Which, by the way, del.icio.us offers a daily blog post tool that will put up a list of your day’s links. Even so, it’s a limited feature; you can’t filter by tags.

Even with this emerging and admittedly very cool tool set, there’s a few missing use cases for the aspiring metajournalist. Imagine if you will a company wanting to create a curated feed from several internal feeds. Let’s take a independent software vendor for example. Let’s say this ISV has:

• A source control system that captures release notes and syndicates via RSS
• An internal document/content management system with feeds; The new MOSS or WSS, for example
• Several internal blogs/bloggers representing different concerns, departments, teams, units, etc.
• Feeds from third party services: PR Newswire, Reuters, AP Wire, Getty Images

How would a new marketer at this ISV take these internal feeds and combine them for a single home page feed? How would customer support professionals treat several disparate feeds as a kind of catalog for making proactive “how to” content?

To move up to higher levels in the Editorial Hierarchy of Needs, you’d really want an application that brought content from multiple feeds into a queue, a holding pen of sorts. Each item in the queue can be republished or, in the case of the metajournalist, tagged for inclusion in an original piece of composite content. Ideally that tool would assist in the author. The editor UI (Live Writer, web-based, BlogJet) does drag-and-drop inclusion of items from the master feed perhaps even tracking and displaying usage so you could avoid or build repetition (depending on your goal).

In the next month or so, I’ll be looking to accomplish the first scenario (holding pen) with Pipes. The workflow:

1. Use Pipes to aggregate multiple feeds and make formatting consistent.
2. Author receives feed in their preferred reader, Google Reader.
3. Author shares items they want to publish.
4. Author burns this feed from Google Reader into a master feed.
5. The master feed is consumed by a widget living on the company site, etc.

As for me and my idea of composite content, I’ll probably stitch together multiple attention feeds (Google Reader starred items, del.icio.us, etc.) in Pipes and bring it down into a hacked up (I’ll have to make) plug-in for Live Writer. Then again, at the current pace of innovation in RSS mashup platforms, by the time I get to it, I really wouldn’t be surprised to find something like this already out there.