Blog: RSS

Help Us Work on This New Tool

Managing News is a Drupal powered news tracker and analyzer that helps communications teams and PR firms monitor news and trends across the internet. We're looking for a few smart, creative engineers to join our tight knit team to work on this new tool. If you're interested in Drupal, the news, aggregation, and working on a totally different type of tool, check out the job description. Drop us a line if you want to learn more: jobs@managingnews.com.

Getting Closer to Streamlined Aggregation in Drupal

Yesterday we rolled out the Beta 3 version of the FeedAPI module. This moves us a step closer to being ready to realize version 1.0. I wanted to take this chance to share where the FeedAPI module currently is and where it is headed. If you’re new to FeedAPI, you can read some background on it and watch a video here.

Currently, FeedAPI includes these features:

• One or more content types as feeds
• One or more content types as feed items
• Non-node entities as feed items
• Easy installation with most popular configuration presets
• Fast aggregation using SimplePie
• Views support
• OPML import and export
• OG aware
• Inherit taxonomy from feed to feed items
• Extensible: hooks, access data through API functions, pluggable parser architecture, pluggable processor architecture
• Simple add form - enter URL and go

Here's a look at just how easy it is to add a new feed with FeedAPI:

So, what’s next?

The World Bank just made its open source aggregator BuzzMonitor available to the public to take for a test drive. This is great news. We worked with the World Bank to build the system, based on Pierre Wielezynski's ideas for source profiling, Yahoo term extraction, Technorati integration, Alexa rankings, tagging, voting and graphing. World Resources Institute also played a hand in the development and is currently using a customized version to track news internally. There is now an online demo up that shows how the World Bank monitors news about AIDS and Africa.

We just finished our beta work on "Managing News," our name for a team aggregator that allows entire organizations to track, manage, analyze, and act on news. It's like a corporate version of Digg meets Bloglines that allows an entire team to monitor news together.

We'll demonstrate the system and the suite of tools we built for Drupal-powered intranets tonight at the Drupal meetup here in Washington, DC. Stop by the Science Club at 7:00 pm to see the system in action. We'll also make a dataset available of news coverage of eight key congressional and senate races leading up to last month's election. We thought the political folks in DC would find this interesting.

Lately we’ve been working on some aggregation tools that plug into Drupal websites. Eventually these tools will let you enter RSS feeds from any website that has one into your own website and have your website collect, store, and display the content. Once on your site, every piece of content will be able to be searched by keyword. So for example with these tools you could create an up to the minute guide on the latest happenings on, well, anything – water pollution in rivers, Brazilian rubber plantations, or HIV prevention programs in Africa. Pretty cool, huh? Let me back up and explain how it all works.

If you’ve ever read an article on Yahoo! News, you’ve probably noticed that some words are also links and look like . If you click on one of these links, a window pops up with search terms related to that word. If the word was "Apple" and it’s an article about computers, you’ll get search results about Apple computers. But if the article is about pies, you’ll get search terms about apples and other fruit.

The Financial Times has a fascinating article on its front page today about a new system in development that will track “market gossip” on the internet – from blogs to regulatory filings and everything in between.

Its initial purpose will be as a filter for hedge funds to analyze online chatter, and ten different hedge funds have already signed up to try out the system. I can see how this could be extremely beneficial to hedge funds, and I bet this would be useful for a myriad of other purposes too. But I’ll get to that in a minute. Here’s one reason from the article of why this system is valuable.

"It's important to know that the smoke is out there and that others see it," he [Scott Lessing, from Citigroup] said. "There may be more information value in online trends in the aggregate: 5,000 more web mentions of a product than the week before could be an important signal for an analyst covering the product's manufacturer."