Publishing designed for Human Consumption
We’re building a publishing system for a client whose interested in creating a podcast directory.
In the course of things the question came up about subscribing to a custom feed generation service that in effect acts as a topic aggregation system and generates feeds based on your choice of topic.
I don’t this its needed here because we already have a filter system that will scan feeds and only promote those that meet certain key words and such that you can set. This service is not much different really.
Our system is dependant on the administrators or publisher actually tuning the keywords and looking at the results. It only gets better the more you use it or the more you figure out what those key words are.
Let me clarify this…. I think a third party service can be useful for this kind of topic feed but it should augment our built system and really only after you know what your needs but it isn’t something we’ve not already developed as well.
Remember that we’ve been working on a ‘publishing system’ all along. More specifically it is an automatic system that is topic focused but designed to create human readable web pages. The human readable part is key. It creates the illusion of having the content edited even when there is no editor. Part of this illusion is to be sure the content promoted to the front is relevant. So in order to work the system has had to be sure that feed items meet some criteria OR be from a very select group of feeds OR both.
An unintended side benefit of creating the system with human readability in mind is that it gets a high search profile. I.E. the things one does to make it palatable to people is exactly what the search engines deem as relevant.
