ImpactWatch Blog

You can make yourself a free, categorized and searchable archive of news on any topic for reference and monitoring using free web-based RSS reader Bloglines in tandem with major news aggregators. This is not something that is immediately apparent, but it’s still relatively simple. Here’s how to do it.

The first thing you’ll need to do is get as much relevant news as possible on the topics of interest to you. There are several volume news aggregators that suit this purpose.

1. 

   Topix – As its title implies, Topix is a “topics” based news aggregator that catgeorizes all its news by specific topics. You can find a complete list of available topics here . They have hundreds of specific topics for news, although the variety of publications offered seems rather limited at this time. Topix has one of the coolest sets of trend-tracking tools which you might also find useful – try doing an advanced search and check out the trend line in the results.

2. 

   Google News – One of Google’s great successes, Google News aggregates an increasingly large number of news sources and allows you to search through them by keyword and subscribe to your serch results via RSS. Right now they are at about 4,500 sources, which is pretty fantastic for a free searchable and RSS-subscribable resource.

3.  

   

   Yahoo! News – Similar to Google News and the original force behind the my.yahoo.com (now waning in polularity), Yahoo! News aggregates from 7,000 news sources in 35 languages, again making it a great resource for what we are trying to accomplish. Yahoo! News also lets you generate an RSS feed with your search results which is necessary for what we want to accomplish.

There are other major news sites such as Microsoft’s Live Search, but none that I have found which offer the flexibility of Topix, Google News and Yahoo! News, and that also allow you to generate RSS feeds from your search results (Ask.com ‘s looks suspiciously Google-esque).

So let’s say you work at Acme Org. and your organization is interested in creating a searchable archive for monitoring general news coverage of their 3 main products, as well as the environmental impact of one of these products in particular. How would you go about this?

• First, you would want to cover as much news as possible so you don’t miss anything. Search for any mention of Acme Org. on the major news aggregator sites (Yahoo! News, Google News and Topix), sort the results by date instead of relevance, and subscribe to the RSS feeds of those searches using Bloglines.
• Enter Bloglines! Bloglines is a free web-based RSS aggregator, and as far as I know the only web-based aggregator out there that allows you to perform searches within your feeds. This of course is key to what we are trying to accomplish. Using the previous example, you would select to perform a search within “My Feeds” only for keywords having to do with Product A of Acme Org. (in their advanced search function you can also specify language here).
• This would give you all the news coverage on Product A from all the news outlets you have subscribed to. Better yet, Bloglines allows you to save your search in Bloglines or even create an RSS feed for this search result – this means you can use any RSS aggregator (the new Google Reader has a really nice interface but, unlike Bloglines, it lacks search functionality within your feeds results) and add that custom-made Bloglines feed to view all the news about Product A from there.
• Frankly, I prefer to stick with Bloglines as it allows me to search my aggregate news pool for Acme Org. really easily. You can then repeat this whole process for Products B and C and any issues you are interested in monitoring and suddenly you have a categorized and searchable up-to-the-minute archive of news about Acme Co.
• If you want to add more local news or news from specific outlets to the searchable news repository, subscribe to RSS feeds from these outlets into a new Bloglines account, search for keywords relevant to Acme Co. within your feeds in that account and then subscribe to the results from your primary Bloglines account. You’ve just added specific news outlets to your growing searchable news archive!

As a basic monitoring solution, this works really well. Try this out and let me know how this works for you. How have you used Bloglines or other RSS readers for your news monitoring needs?Of course, if you need something more exptensive there are a lot of great options out there. Including our own ImpactWatch™. Shameless plug.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 2nd, 2006 at 4:48 pm and is filed under ImpactWatch, ImpactWatch Features, News Feeds, RSS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.