Blog Topic Ideas - Live Feeds

  26 Jul 2007 by Vyoma

This is a part of the Blog Topic Idea series.

This is something I have been using lately.  It is not something ground breaking - but if you use the right tools, it can save you a lot of hassles wading through a lot of feeds in your feed reader.

You already will be having feeds to established blogs in your feed reader.  But there will be a lot of blogs, and it can be a pain reading through all of them.  Luckily for us, there are quite a lot of tools out there that can do most of the mechanical work for us.

Let me go by example of how I use this technique to generate topic ideas for my art blog, KalaaLog.com.

Among other things, “digital painting” is a key phrase that is very relevant to this blog.  I go to Google Blog Search and Technorati search, and pop in this key phrase.  They give me results, but what I am interested in is the feed to that result.  If you are a bit less geeky than me, you can just use these feeds as it is.

But I went ahead and did a few more things with these feeds. I used the Yahoo Pipes to do some more of the mechanical works for me.  I created a pipe, that took these feeds, aggregated them, filtered them for spammy words (you know them, don’t you?) and then sorted them by publish date.  The result is not as glamorous as I want, but it is workable.  I take the feed of the output of this pipe and use it in my choice of feedreader.

I just schedule a time of day as per my convenience and sift through them.  By end of it, I have my head filled with topic ideas.

8 Responses so far

  1. Bush Mackel July 26, 2007 5:03 pm

    Good thoughts. I may have to add this technique to my arsenal.

  2. Blogging Tip - How to get the topics to write about ? : Tips, News, Opinions by ReviewSaurus July 26, 2007 5:23 pm

    [...] Live Feeds [...]

  3. Wishlost July 26, 2007 5:24 pm

    Great thoughts put in.. well the technology is growing so fast that we hardly know what’s happening and what’s not at times.

    Did not know about pipes from yahoo.. something new to explore from my end now :)

    ~Gautam

  4. Vyoma July 26, 2007 5:28 pm

    Bush, do let me know how you find it.

  5. Vyoma July 26, 2007 5:32 pm

    Gautam, even I never thought I could use Yahoo Pipes. I had heard about it long back, and lately I thought about this.

    I am not sure if there are other ‘mashup’ services out there - but if there are any uses of such service, this definitely is one of them.

    :)

  6. reviewsaurus July 27, 2007 5:13 pm

    Well, I believe that this is one of the best trick. I make use of Google Alerts but I think that this is much better than Google Alerts as, it gives the power of other blog search engines too.

  7. Vyoma July 27, 2007 6:48 pm

    Yes Mayank. And best thing about it is that I can filter things out of the result I get before I get it into my feedreader - that is something I like the most of this approach.

  8. wepouys October 15, 2007 12:45 pm

    Hello !
    Sorry to bother you. I found this forum when looking through google for forums to use. I need
    to install a forum on my website but I cannot find where it is sold.

    Where did you get this one

    Thanks for any assistance

Leave a Comment

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Comments