NOTE: This is part 6 of a 12-part CONTENTIOUS tutorial, What Are Webfeeds (RSS), and Why Should You Care? (Full table of contents available on that main page.)
The first and best way to find good webfeeds (often called RSS feeds) is to check your favorite Web sites to see what they offer. You may get lucky. More and more sites are adding webfeeds every day (especially weblogs and news sites), although for some unfathomable reason not every site with a webfeed makes it easy to find.
If you can’t easily locate a webfeed on a particular site, you have lots of other options…
First, try using Feedster’s FeedFinder tool. Just enter the domain of a Web site, and FeedFinder will search that domain and list any webfeeds it finds there. (There may be more than one; some sites publish several feeds.) Click the link for the feed you want in the “RSS URLs” column of the search results, and it will take you to the page for that feed. From there, just subscribe.
FEED AGGREGATORS: SEARCH ENGINES FOR WEBFEEDS
Feed aggregator services such as Feedster, Syndic8, and NewsIsFree are another great way to find interesting webfeeds. These sites collect the content of thousands (or millions) of webfeeds, categorize the results, and allow you to keyword-search the content of those feeds.
(NOTE: Some people use the word “aggregator” to refer to feed readers. I know, it’s confusing. This confusion is why I attempt to differentiate between the two concepts more clearly.)
Since most webfeeds currently exist to support weblogs or news sites, feed aggregators can be a good way to quickly peruse a variety of perspectives on an event or person in the news. For instance, if you search Feedster for the keyword “Ashcroft” you’ll always get a broad array of current results related to this controversial U.S. official. This strategy can add rich context to straightforward news reports on topics that interest you.
CREATING FEEDS WHERE NONE EXIST: SCRAPING
While webfeeds are becoming increasingly popular, many (perhaps most) sites still do not offer this service. If you really would like to get a feed from a site that doesn’t offer one, you can try to create one using a “scraping” service (which “scrapes” information from a site in order to create a feed) such as Blogstreet. Be forewarned: these services don’t always work well, but they’re often worth a try.
Or perhaps some intrepid programmer has already created a scraped feed for a particular site that works well. If so, FeedFinder will probably list it in its search results. Googling for the site name plus the words “RSS” or “feed” also might turn up a scraped feed.
Scraped feeds are a bit of an ethical gray area. Some people think that if a content publisher does not publish their own feed, no one else has the right to create a feed for their content. Personally, I don’t have a problem with subscribing to scraped feeds for personal reading – I simply wouldn’t ever republish their content. You’re free to make up your own mind on this matter.
BUG YOUR FAVORITE SITES TO OFFER WEBFEEDS
Often sites will create webfeeds in response to requests from their readers. I’ve created a couple of form letters to make it easy to ask/persuade your favorite site to offer this service. (Version for everyone, and for journalists. I’ll be updating them soon to reflect the terminology shift to “webfeed.”)
