1) http://www.voidstar.com/ukpoliblog is an RSS aggregator of UK political Blogs. I've been trying to find a good aggregated feed of UK Political news so I turned to Yahoo. Unfortunately, there's no UK Politics section. And http://uk.news.yahoo.com/ doesn't seem to have RSS feeds. Neither does http://uk.search.yahoo.com/ And I've been unable to construct a good query in http://search.news.yahoo.com that gives just UK politics.

Then the News search display is broken in Firefox.

And the relevance display doesn't group similar stories so when AP or Reuters send something out you get 30 copies of the same article from all the news sources that just republish them verbatim.

Most of the problems above are the same on Google news and I've been told off for scraping them to RSS so I can't use it anyway.

Boy, there's a lot of borkedness in that lot!

2) After waving fingers in the air, we worked out that there's something like 15 million feeds of Atom, RSS, RDF and FOAF out there. Which raises a big question in my mind of what search engines should do with it all. Mixing it in with the normal search results with links to the raw XML doesn't feel right. It feels like there's potential here for something genuinely new. Or maybe Yahoo, Google or MSN should just buy Technorati, employ the people and ideas and then re-engineer it for scale from the ground up.

3) I'd rather post this on the mailing lists but they all seem to be dead. I went looking for the messages where Zawodny posted the detail but Yahoo have deleted it. Where do the movers and shakers in these areas hang out now? Have we all retreated into our own little blog worlds with comments and trackback turned off because email, email mailing lists and usenet are terminally broken and the spammers have won?


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[ 21-Aug-04 12:21pm ]