Task 5 - More RSS

So, the first part of the assignment involved adding a bunch of sites of interest to your RSS, which I had pretty much covered. I did throw in a couple more. And to add some of the other blogs from the course, which I did. With all of us at different parts of the syllabus at the moment, I don't know how many of these blogs will actually have new content but a few of them are pretty interesting, so it would be nice if they kept going.

The other part of the assignment was more frustrating. We were told to create a custom news search in the google news reader, find a set of search parameters that produced results of interest, and then subscribe to it. The actual process was pretty straightforward, but the results tended to be lousy. With the regular google searches, things are listed in order of likelihood of relevance, based on a nice little mathematical algorithm. The result being that even though a lot of the hits are sort of crappy, there's a very good chance that what you want is near the top of the list. On the news search, things are listed chronologically. Sturgeon's Law (95% of everything is crap) is strictly enforced, and its hard to find a set of search terms that doesn't bury the items of interest in a sea of unrelated nonsense and/or PR puff pieces.

In some ways, the more esoteric and specific the search, the better. There will be less news about it, but on the other hand, no major corporation will be spamming the news feeds with self-promoting "news" (read those as sarcastic air quotes). When I tried doing a news search for Calculus Education, one of the links was actually a political cartoon about obesity. It was in the search because in the comments below it, there was a flame war going on about the posters education or lack thereof, and "calculus" and "education" were mentioned in the flame war. Yay relevance. Finally added "Classical Music Composition" as a news search to my RSS because there were maybe 3-4 really worthwhile and interesting articles on the first page of hits, which is a pretty good yield. My suspicion is that the main use for this sort of feed will be as a wide net to find individual sites of interest, including better site aggregators.