May 212012
This post will take around 103 seconds to read.
When there’s a lot of coverage about an event it’s tempting to resort to a list of links and leave the rest to the reader. Are there any ways of automating the list creation process, freeing up some brain time, or of extracting some content to make the list slightly more alluring?
Two posts last week touched on both of these issues:
- aggregating blogs for a MOOC - the #fslt12 MOOC has gone for aggregating feeds into a WordPress site, using a plugin, I’m guessing; people who want their blogs syndicated can specify a tag or category, so only relevant posts are pulled in. The post also looks at some other aggregators and a blog/comment scraper, all of which look interesting if requiring some technical nous.
- using Google Spreadsheets to dashboard blog feeds – another great spreadsheet from @mhawksey taking a list of RSS feeds from various blogging platforms and filtering for specific tags/categories; the next step is to combine the content
Most of these solutions call for a level of metadata literacy : O from the bloggers themselves.
Anyway, here’s a list of various blog aggregations/syndications/portals I’ve been collecting, illustrating a range of approaches:
- Bloggingportal.eu – portal for EU political blogs celebratory post | flak
- Change MOOC – browse blog posts and view blogs list for the truly massive #change11 MOOC
- Communities & Networks Connection | about – possibly in information overload corner
- DREaM event 4 - example of coverage from an event
- Institutional Web Team Blog Aggregator – has channels for content management, events and linked data
- Public Sector Bloggers – GovBlogging (from 2011 but still relevant) discusses creating a usable aggregation
- Warwick Blogs – the University of Warwick’s blog portal
- Weekly Blog Camp – site encouraging people in the third sector to write; looks like done manually, with a weekly summary post
- new! 23 Things for Professional Development - has an RSS feed bundle type thing on Diigo for all participant blogs plus a list of recent posts
Notice how I can’t resist putting my list of links into alphabetical order…
I can confirm that, at present, Weekly Blog Club is carefully hand-crafted aggregation. People notify that they want their blog included through tweeting the link with the hashtag #weeklyblogclub or mentioning @WeeklyBlogClub.
Thanks for that @WeeklyBlogClub – and I think with your summary you can call it curation : P