Thanks to Giovanni Guardalben for the tip this weekend:

Marjolein Hoekstra and Todd And have used a bunch of free tools to create a OPML/RSS mashup called Kitchen Sink. They have NewsGator, FeedBurner, MySyndicaat, and Grazr in the mix to create a boutique search engine and feed source for a select group of blogs. (In this case, that group is from the list of Todd’s 150 Top Marketing Blogs. If marketing isn’t your thing, you could do the same approach with any OPML file.)

How it Works

Here’s the basic flow: OPML reading list of feeds from Todd’s Newsgator Online account. The OPML is then pulled into MySyndicaat to pull together the actual content of all of the RSS and Atom feeds into a river of news. The massive combined RSS feed that results is then prettied up in FeedBurner.

From there they used the very-beta GrazrScript (and a lot of help from Mike at Grazr) to create a GUI that lets you explore the data from the feed, using ReFilter to filter content based on keywords.

Kitchen Sink also lets you subscribe to a custom feed of your keyword searches… you’ll only get items from the blog list that have your keywords.

Wish List

I would like to see the Kitchen Sink widget hooked directly to MySyndicaat (using ReFilter in the GUI). That would cover the bare minimum of technologies needed and still deliver the desired end state: Choose/find your sources in MySyndicaat, and let them do the work of pulling the feeds and storing the master content. Use GrazrScript for the front end, and ReFilter for on-demand filtering of the master content.

Trouble Spots

1. I don’t know how well ReFilter will hold up under a heavy load, but I’m betting that if your user base is in the hundreds or low thousands, it should be fine. Hopefully they have a good bandwidth usage plan, (or a good cache scheme) since they have to re-read the feed every time.

2. The lynch pin, of course, is that the Grazr guys probably aren’t going to be able to do custom work for everybody who asks. My guess is development of GrazrScript will need to mature for awhile before this kind of approach is widely possible for the geek masses.

Update February 6, 2007

I chatted with Marjolein this morning about Kitchen Sink, congratulating her on making TechMeme for so long yesterday. Marjolein noted that although she has “less hair” because of various issues she had to work through in GrazrScript, the Grazr team didn’t need to contribute much. She did note that they readily squashed any bugs she found in GS, so that aspect of their support was invaluable. (Mike at Grazr also commented below on his involvement, and believes that GS is more mature than I state above.)

The technical aspect of redirecting RSS and Atom feeds from one URL to another has been discussed lately, but there is also an issue of etiquette that is worth thinking through. Let me explain…

It has been quiet lately on inkBlots as I’ve been working on a project I intend to announce in a few weeks. More details are forthcoming as things come closer together, but the whole notion centers around a non-profit venue for strong technology-related content that will reach a broader audience than “just my blog.”

My plan at this point is to point the inkBlots feed to the new site, so the transition would be seamless. You would get the same sort of stuff you get on inkBlots, plus (I hope) quite a bit more. Basically, you wouldn’t have to do anything, since the same RSS feed you use now would pull from the new site. (inkBlots would stay behind as an archive, but no longer be updated.)

Technically, this is easy stuff (thanks to FeedBurner.) But what about the etiquette of it?

Is it okay if a feed follows an author to a new site?  Is redirecting a feed to a strongly-related site a reasonable thing to do?  Is it a nice convenience, or does it feel like a bait-and-switch? When is it not okay?  Is announcing intent enough, or should something else be done?
What do you think?

If you have a FeedBurner account, you can use the new Publicize/SpringWidgets service to publish your feed in a Flash-based RSS/Atom Reader. This gives you the ability to drop an embed tag into any HTML page or as a widget in social sites like MySpace.

As an experiment I put one on markwoodman.com, and I like the results. Here’s a screenshot of a smaller version:

This example has small dimensions, but you can specify any length/width you like. (The one on markwoodman.com is much wider.) If you would like to play with the SpringWidget interface, you can use my widget as an example.

The widget skin provided through FeedBurner only gives partial text of each item, but in a widget environment, that makes sense. Clicking on an item will take you to the corresponding page, or you can click on the embedded RSS icon to take you to the FeedBurner feed. Good stuff.