Too many feeds

Blog aggregation has been getting some local attention of late. Subtly, in LIB's invitation to the next Madison Blogger Roundup: "It doesn't matter if you're a politico, a foodie, a music critic, an aggregator, or a random muser." And more overtly, when Fearful Symmetries declared the local blog aggregators "virtually unusable"--citing dane101.net, madison miscellany, and Post as clogged with disparate dreck (my slanted paraphrase). The non-local (but neighborhoody!) omission, outside.in, employs a user-generated and geo-tagged model that would seem to resolve some of FS' criticisms. At the moment, though, outside.in seems to have too small a user base to be useful to the average reader: it's more a trickle-of-traffic phenomenon stat-counting bloggers observe, than anything else.

I actually emailed Shane Wealti, Dane101 tech guru, a couple weeks ago to ask about dane101.net:

I put together a post re: splicing feeds together using mysyndicaat (or similar). To put things in context, though, I figured I'd first ask about Dane101.net, since it's the only automated local aggregator I can think of.

That abortive post, more or less:
Ever since the great mixtape crackdown of '06, and some increased scrutiny over at the mother ship, I'd been trying to figure out a way to aggregate myself, i.e. combine my enthusiasm for sophomoric ranting, inside baseball, literature, and shitty radio-ripped mp3s. It's that last thing that presents the biggest hurdle. I can no longer get away with posting a Chops/Jay-Z remix of "Show Me What You Got" on madison.com servers, so that has to happen elsewhere. But I'd like to be able to point people to one location that consolidates all my posts, basically a friends and family mash-up, so those 5 people don't have to check 4 different blogs, or subscribe to 4 different feeds.

It was a half-hearted pursuit: every so often, I'd google "splicing together RSS feeds." Recently I came across MySyndicaat, a newsmastering tool which theoretically allows you to plug in multiple feed urls and end up with a happy monster feed. There are a bunch of potential applications for this. Theoretically, one could assemble a local music blog aggregator in 10 minutes.

I felt really clever for about 2 minutes, and then found out there were a bunch of other services that do similar things.

Also, MySyndicaat doesn't work as smoothly as hoped. There's a series of delays between posting, source feed generation, and the mashing. And editing posts seems to send the aggregated feed haywire. Not sure if that's a problem with the source feeds themselves, or the splicing process. Shane sort of addresses this below, but...

• This test feed will give you an idea of what I mean
  
• Here's a mash-up of Isthmus' articles, Daily Page "posts" and Madison Miscellany that seems to work just fine: link to the XML
  

On to the few questions I asked Shane. Basically, how was Dane101.net set up in the first place?

I'm assuming it's some sort of mash-up of the feeds for the included blogs. How long did it take to put that together? Was there a bunch of coding involved? (easily describable in laypeople's terms?)

SW: Dane101.net is based on the Drupal CMS which has a very good built-in aggregator. Basically you just enter the feed URL and give it a title.

There is some customization, and coding required though because a lot of sites output malformed RSS feeds and have other quirks. Some feeds are run through feedburner and other feed-converters before being input into Dane101.net to make them compatible.

What's the primary value of an automated aggregator like dane101.net?

SW: It provides a centralized place for bloggers and blog readers to go to find out what other people are writing about.

How (if it all) has your take on the above question evolved since the initial launch of dane101.net?

SW: I'm pretty much of the same opinion. We are working on some significant enhancements to Dane101.NET that will be introduced in the near future that I think you will be really impressed with and will make Dane101 a much more useful resource.

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^{A recent Dane101 call for new contributors mentioned that they "are very interested in finding designers who may be interested in playing with us as we work on our redesign, work on some additional projects, and add more bells and whistles. Everyone loves bells and whistles."}

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Addenda: I sent the email below [brackets added afterward] as a follow-up to Shane, hoping he'd reveal more about the bells and whistles.

"What's the primary value of an automated aggregator like dane101.net?
SW: It provides a centralized place for bloggers and blog readers to go to find out what other people are writing about."

I guess that was a dumb question--maybe I meant to get at something that distinguishes between dane101.net's automated process, and the editorial/curatorial element of something like madison miscellany, or outPost's sidebar links. As both of those theoretically provide that "centralized place," right?

Maybe I'm off the mark, but I think something automated, with [sifting and winnowing] tagging from an established user base like Dane101's--and hopefully growing beyond that--would render those [unilateral] "editorial" solutions obsolete. Especially if you maximized its portability--like provided code that local bloggers could use to embed a mini-version in their sidebars, like feedburner's headline animator, or something like that.