Roll your own news in RSS

Courtesy of Steve Rubel, here’s an ingenious way of turning non-RSS enabled news sources into RSS feeds, using GoogleNews and Gnews2RSS. Exceedingly useful for keeping up with those sites that haven’t got around to smelling the coffee and turning on their RSS feeds.

A similar way of achieving the same ends is through NewsIsFree, who have taken a portal approach - they claim to monitor 13,166 sources (currently) and offer a range of premium services. Interestingly they’re also including advertisements interleaved with the actual news items, something which I’m finding suprisingly unobtrusive. Effectively I just scan over the ads in much the same way as I would an article that doesn’t interest me - so it’s not entirely clear what kind of CPM metrics could be used to work out the ad’s payback.

But this type of ultra-personalised news is most definitely the future - now if only electronic paper would hurry itself up and arrive…

Filed under Clutter Management, RSS |