Apr 14 2008
Blog Aggregation Pages — best practices?
The challenge is to tie together 100+ blogs authored by Olympic athletes, coaches, friends and family into a single page.
Purpose of the page is:
- Highlight the “post of the day” as determined by a blogger-in-chief
- Permit the reader to scan the latest posts from the bloggers
- Permit the reader to manage subscriptions to the RSS of those blogs to their preferred aggregator (Google Reader, Bloglines, etc.)
- Publish Tweets
- Publish latest shared media
- Flickr/Picasa Photos
- YouTube Videos
- del.icio.us tags
Esteban Panzeri is on the job, and I suggested Alltop as one example of an interface example, but no one (Bhargava and Bell) seemed overly excited. And having visited Alltop a total of two times, I was stupid to reference something I don’t even use.
The ideal would be a shared Google Reader interface — all the functionality but constrained to a managed blogroll/OPML file. Public Google Reader. Possible? Second question is how to incorporate reader inputs. Third question: is it still too early to present a consumer web user with a call to action to click on an orange RSS button to subscribe to a feed? Are most consumers accustomed to a direct blog visit? I must dust off aggregator and feed reader adoption statistics.
Know of any good examples of blog network homepages? Should we be looking at HuffPo? CapeCodToday? Mark Cahill and I tried to tackle this with a community of saltwater fly fishing bloggers in 2003-2004, but it was too early to get much traction.
Something like this?
http://www1.netvibes.com/marketingpilgrim
Sounds a lot like netvibes.com or a social media newsroom where you have more design control – http://www.shiftcomm.com/newsroom/
Another alltop-ish layout- http://www.socialblogroll.com/
Thanks. Good suggestions. Netvibes is a little bleak and more evocative of our Google built Olympic Podium than I’d like. I was thinking something like http://www.lenovoblogs.com but more robust and dynamic.
[...] David Churbuck posts this morning on Blog Aggregation. We both did a blog aggregation project over at Reel-Time.com in 2003 which, as he notes, was well ahead of the curve (and probably the need). He’s got some excellent points, but I have a few things to add. [...]
Take another look at Social Media Today, which is running on the Blogtronix platform.
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/
I blogged on the topic…here’s a summary.
1. I don’t like the shrink wrap solutions – all blogs have RSS and it’s too easy to slice and dice RSS content – consider roll your own.
2. Tagging and categorization strategy is key.
3. Aggregation is simple content management – think of it that way and you can really make things happen.
RSS is XML and XML is content separated from style – it’s your job to reapply the style, so do it well.
http://www.allthingscahill.com/2008/04/blog-aggregation
Maybe something using Ning? http://www.ning.com/about/features.html
You might want to check out The Participatory Fnd.’s Miro media player, specifically their Video Bomb feature. It allows your community to aggregate, tag and share video feeds embedded into your homepage. Essentially RSS feeds for video, which your core users, say tops fans for each athlete would prob. love to be given the power to highlight their inspiration athletes.
[...] It is finally live so I can talk about it. Some time ago David asked how to aggregate 100+ feeds in a single site. He got some very interesting answers, most notably one pingback from Mark Cahill. [...]