RSS Feeds for Searches

Sometimes, rather than following new contributions from designated bloggers, it might be helpful to search all blogs to see what writers unfamiliar to you have to say on a designated topic. Most search services would allow you to locate relevant information contained in blogs, but we have something a little different in mind here. Let us say that we want to follow the information available on a topic over time. Once a general search had provided background, the new goal might be to develop an efficient system to identify new information on that topic. We could repeat our initial search every day, but this approach would not be very efficient for locating just new information.

The combination of an aggregator and an RSS feed offer the solution to this information problem. If an example would make the usefulness of the search for new blog entries more concrete, consider our information challenge in developing this resource. We have made every effort to identify existing information on the role of the participatory web in education, but the challenge is endless. While we spend time writing, new tools, examples, and perspectives continue to emerge. We need some practical way to track the emergence of new information.

Here is the specific approach we have taken. Variations on our approach could be implemented with other "tools".

Google offers a specialized blog search service - Google Blog Search.

Our first step was to use the Google blog search tool to execute the following search:
education AND ("participatory web" OR "web 2.0" OR "read write")

We use this complex search "query" because the topic of interest has no official vocabulary and bloggers may chose their own terminology even when more formal language is available. We use the term education to eliminate many posts focused on other fields (e.g., business) and we ask for posts that contain one of the multiple terms we have used to describe the participatory web.

This query generates a huge number of hits (just under 13,000). It is really not this list of hits that interests us. The results page offers the option of creating an RSS feed. This feed is what need for the purpose of locating new posts as they are generated.

					
					
					
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=education+AND+
(%22participatory+web%22+OR++%22web+2.0%22+OR+%22read+write%22)&ie=
utf-8&num=10&output=rss   

					
					
				

Remember - you DO NOT have to learn to write this complicated address. The feed address is generated for you. You need only copy and paste it.

This RSS address can be added to an aggregator. We use Bloglines to follow the new posts from several bloggers so it makes sense to add this feed to the list. However, instead of allowing us to follow the recent posts from specific bloggers, the feed we have created allows us to follow what any blogger known to Google has to say about the participatory web and education. Of course, we miss relevant posts that fail to include the search terms we have designated, but our approach is reasonable and quite powerful.

As an option to what we have just described, you may want to make use of another popula blog search service - Technorati.com. Technorati offers a specialized service called ''Watchlists''. Once you become a registered user of Technorati, you can create watchlists based on your personal interests. These lists return recent blog posts based on the search terms you specify.

Other Aggregators

Here are some other feed aggregators you may want to explore.

Google Reader - other major aggregator
- a Google Reader tutorial I developed for my class

Netvibes, iGoogle - these are personal home pages. Among the components you can add to your personal home page are individual RSS feeds. This works well if you follow a small number of blogs.