Sebastian and Wil Richardson continue to discuss RSS in academia. Particularly interesting is the dialog about automatic aggregation of RSS content. It has been a while since I've played with these ideas (and let me remind you, I'm not a programmer, so all I can do is come up with the ideas).
In February, I was all worked up about the impending release of Radio Community Server. I had sent John Robb an email (snippet below) and his response pointed me to RCS. RCS is great, and it is a step in the right direction, but I am still searching for the capabilities I desire...
First, I will have a default set of baseline categories for all of my staff that address common topics (troubleshooting windows, student portal project, etc.). That, obviously, is not a problem with Radio. The challenge is with the next step--I want to have an aggregator (I've been thinking that Manila is the natural tool for the job) collect all of these same-topic feeds and collect them as a topical publication of the _group's_ efforts. It is one step further than the publication of an individual's topical feeds through the use of categories in Radio--it offers a one-stop aggregation of that topic at the departmental or unit level. My mind starts to spin with the possiblities this would open up. As I understand it, it would require Radio to allow the same functionality that is represented by Dave's Manila-Blogger Bridge but at the level of the category. Each category could be set up to publish to a Manila server.
Is this even worth considering? Is there a way to set up Manila to "listen" to an RSS feed? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Can you point me in the right direction?
This isn't exactly the application of the current discussion, but the same tool could theoretically be used to solve both problems, no?
2:27:55 PM 
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