In case you haven’t noticed, I try to stay abreast of new developments on a wide range of topics.
One of my favorite ways to accomplish that is custom keyword webfeeds. This means I conduct keyword searches of sites which aggregate massive numbers of webfeeds (RSS or Atom), and then use that search as the basis of a custom keyword feed, automatically generated by the search service. That feed will then alert me about each new occurrence of my target keyword that shows up in the feeds monitored by that site.
For a long time I had been generating these customer keyword search feeds through Feedster. And they worked well – for awhile. Unfortunately, like many hugely popular free Web-based services that are run by one or a few people, Feedster’s custom webfeeds have gotten quite flaky on me for awhile. They would break, or wouldn’t update appropriately. I still love Feedster and I still use it, but for custom webfeeds I need a more reliable solution.
I think I’ve found it: Check out Blogdigger…
Like Feedster, Blogdigger provides a simple, easy way to search the contents of a huge number of webfeeds. It also allows you to create custom webfeeds based on your search criteria.
Just do any search in Blogdigger. Then, on the results page, click the subscribe to this search button on the right-hand side of that page. You even have a choice of XML (RSS 2.0) or Atom webfeed format. So far these feeds have proven pretty reliable to me. I hope they will remain so – but in any event, it’s better to have two options for this crucial service than one.
I just created one of these feeds to track occurrences of the phrase sustainable development. Here’s what the raw feed looks like. You can subscribe to that in your feed reader to see the results.
I’m hoping that over time the reliability of Feedster’s custom webfeeds will improve. I know the Feedster people are working very hard over there, and they do a lot of great work. Still, they’re not the only ones doing great work in that particular niche.
If you publish webfeeds, definitely make sure your feed is monitored by both Feedster and Blogdigger. Those services will vastly expand your feed’s reach.
