ImpactWatch Blog

The beauty of ImpactWatch is that you can literally add content from any source – this includes RSS feeds. Setting up a new RSS is easy using the administrative tools on your ImpactWatch system.

1. Go to the admin dropdown and select “feed config“. This will present a list of all of the content feeds presently available on your system.

2. Select “RSS feed” from the list. This page displays all of your current RSS feeds.

3. Select “Create a new RSS feed” at the bottom of the page. This will take you to an entry page for a new RSS feed.

4. Select your RSS options.

- Enabled – click this check box to make the RSS feed active. You can make the feed inactive at any time by unselecting this option.

- Warn Hours – enter the number of hours after which ImpactWatch will send you an email to let you know that no new content has arrived from this source. Keep in mind how active you expect the feed to be when selecting the time period.

- Feed Interval – select the frequency with which ImpactWatch will retrieve data from this RSS feed.

- Source Media Type – select the type of media that best represents this source.

- Article Type – select the type of article that is most frequently provided by this source.

- Name – give your RSS feed a name so that you can easily pick it out of your comprehensive feed list.

- Query URL – copy and paste the actual URL of the RSS feed.

- Full Text Feed – click this box if the RSS feed provides full text. This determines where the content will be entered by the ImpactWatch system.

- Parser type – select the name that corresponds to the type of RSS feed you are setting up – Yahoo, Google News, Google Blog, Radian6 or custom.

5. Click “Add New RSS Feed Configuration” and the system will retrieve data from your RSS feed at the time interval that you have selected.

-

The whole process takes no more than a couple of minutes and your new feed is ready to go. Of course, you should feel free to ask your client manager if you have any questions. They will also be happy to set up your RSS feeds up for you.

-

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnysilva/ / CC BY 2.0

Earlier this week Facebook announced the general availability of an Open Stream API allowing developers to incorporate user’s activity stream into their applications. For instance, I use Tweedeck to keep track of all the people I’m following on Twitter, and now one of the columns I can display shows the activity stream of my friends and I on Facebook. I can see it all in the same interface. Another example is the third-party Facebook application Newsfeed RSS. Once I added that application and gave it access to my activity stream, it output a RSS feed link that I can use to pull that information into any feed reader I want. Not only could I keep track in my reader now, but it would be archiving that feed so I can go back and find status updates in the past.

This is a big step forward in convenience, and it seems that a lot of people in the blogosphere are talking about how great it is for you to be able to access your activity stream, and all the activity streams of the people who trust you as friends on Facebook.

But that brings up a big question. What about that trust?

I’ve always though it was kind of weird that if a friend of yours is tagged in a photo, not only can you see that photo, but you can see the whole album, even if the person who posted it isn’t a friend of yours. Newsfeed RSS pretty much makes that possible with your entire activity stream.

RSS output allows you to not only read it in your RSS feed reader, but theoretically you could publish that feed anywhere. I could set up a public website showing all of my and my friends updates, viewable by anyone without them ever having to log in to Facebook or have any of my friends approve of it.

In the past Facebook has always been considered a “walled garden” of information in which they could control the walls. While it would be socially unacceptable to broadcast all of my friends updates, and surely against the Faceook Terms of Service, they sure have made it a lot easier to technically do it.

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. (more…)