Rip Mix Feed: Alan Levine Goes After RSS NewsMastering Tools

Alan Levine catches on, all on his own, on the base core concept of a newsmaster. He just gracefully lands on it as many of you have as well, and he goes out to test a few of the possible alternative services that he found to facilitate this task.

Unfortunately he selects Feedster and Blogdigger Groups, which nonetheless their generous efforts, still leave lots to be desired in providing the ability to select, filter and mix into one multiple RSS feeds and search queries.

Though these are still quite far from being the newsmaster killer app I have been waiting for, there are a few tools out there that are worth a good mention.

In particular:

1) The good tools from Antone Roundy, including Carp, Grouper and Jawfish are all good. Not for the faint of heart and non-techie. Some don't even have an interface.

2) Hexamail News2Web. This is a desktop news and filtering aggregator that just does through an organized interface what Alane Levine was attempting to achieve.

3) Magpie. If you are into PHP, this free tool can do the news aggregation and output into one new RSS feed quite reliably.

4) Myst Technologies. Though, I can't pinpoint a URL where a specific product is listed, I know the great pool of guys at Myst Technologies, and they certainly are well equipped to make this customized to your need if you have a serious business application.

I have also pulled together quite a few extra tools and hacks that may greatly facilitate the task of the emerging newsmaster. Collected into a well organized PDF called the NewsMaster Toolkit, it brings together over 16 different technologies to attack the rip, mix, feed the task at hand while adding 16 more to create RSS feeds from most any content available out there.

For more information please see:

• The Birth Of The NewsMaster: The Network Starts To Organize Itself


• The RSS NewsMaster


• The NewsMasters Toolkit