Everyone a Re-PublisherEveryone a Re-​​Publisher

I’ve produced an exper­i­mental social media news page using Feedly Mixes. You can embed this sort of thing into any site you like.

As you can see, it grabs and mixes up the content from selected RSS feeds – a list of sites covering the subject, as chosen by me. It then ranks the articles according to whether I deem a par­tic­ular site important. Articles that I tweet or share in Feedly will also be included and take pre­ced­ence on the page. Then it uses Google Reader’s stat­istics on how many people read, saved and shared articles to bubble up leading stories. Finally, it uses the age of the article as a fourth filter. The content is refreshed every 3–4 hours.

I’m not sure that my par­tic­ular imple­ment­a­tion is espe­cially useful. The sort of person likely to visit this site almost cer­tainly already reads the sites I have selected.

However, I think it could be a really useful tool in other cir­cum­stances. If you work in a par­tic­ular domain – let’s say it’s con­struc­tion – then it really is child’s play to create a page that gives a digest of the day’s news from the pub­lic­a­tions that deal with that area. That page could be set as everyone’s home page in your firm, or a link on the browser’s favour­ites bar, making sure the whole business is up-​​to-​​date with the latest news.

It’s better than the sort of pages you get at Alltop because you decide and curate the content sources – the con­struc­tion page on that site is a good example of why you want this – a lot of the sources are US-​​based, which won’t be very relevant if, like me, you’re based in South London. There’s also no way I can see to flag par­tic­ular stories as important.

A slightly more poetic use for Feedly Mixes might be the Interesting Pictures feed from flickr or ffffound. Maybe a per­son­al­ised web comics page or a selec­tion of new short stories.

NB: WordPress doesn’t deal well with the iFrames used to display the Feedly Widget on pages – you’ll need to install the Embed iFrame plug-​​in to get it to work.

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Possibly related:

• HOW-​​​​TO Create an RSS Feed
• A Better Impression
• Missed the news? It’s gone