"...I have been using the existing network in order to collect, organize, and redistribute information.
In a certain sense, what I have been building is the equivalent of an airport hub or freeway interchange, a place where many strands of the network come together, are reorganized, and redistributed.
What I have built is a system called Edu_RSS, a software program that harvests the RSS feeds from two or three hundred educational technology blogs, stores the links in a searchable database, and then, sorts the links into topics and redistributes the results as a set of topic-specific RSS feeds.
Thus, for example, I have on my website a page called ‘learning objects’ that represents, in real time, the collective contributions of several hundred authors, and yet is specific enough that it represents a very concentrated – and manageable – stream of information for the average reader.
Essentially, what Edu_RSS has become is a specialized content filter.
It filters content in two ways.
First, it filters content by selectivity. Our of the four million or so RSS feeds available, I have selected only a small number, only those relevant to my particular interests, from sources I think are reliable.
Second, it filters by content. Each item is subjected to a semantical test – in my case, by matching it with a regular expression. Only items that match the expression are forwarded through the feed.
Edu_RSS also interprets data as it comes in.
The world of RSS is unstructured – there are no fewer than nine types of RSS, numerous modifications and extensions, syntactic variations, and more. From this hodge-podge Edu_RSS extracts only the information it needs.
If information is missing it supplies its own data. Part of Edu_RSS, a routine that analyzes mailing lists and creates specialized mailing list RSS feeds, actually constructs part of the RSS file by examining other data.
But for all that, the key to Edu_RSS is specialization.
For all its power, it only tries to do this work for a small part of the internet. It is no Google; it is nothing more than a single node in a very complex network."
And now fasten your seat belt for the key statement here. Would-be independent publishers, digital information librarians, research masters and pro-bloggers...open your ears. (I am telling you this stuff is coming.)
