As I mentioned a couple of weeks or so ago I’ve been playing around with Friendfeed. This is a ‘lifestreaming’ web service which allows you to aggregate ‘all’ of the content you are generating on the web into one place (see here for mine). This is interesting from my perspective because it maps well onto our ideas about generating multiple data streams from a research lab. This raw data then needs to be pulled together and turned into some sort of narrative description of what happened. Continue reading “Friendfeed, lifestreaming, and workstreaming”
Slashing and hacking feeds
More followup on feeds. I’ve set up a friendfeed which is available here. Amongst other things I’ve been trying to aggregate my comments on other people’s blogs. The way I am doing this is creating a tag in Google Reader which I have made public. When I leave a comment I try to subscribe to a comment feed for that Blog, I then tag it as ‘Comments feed’ which aggregates and makes it public as an RSS feed. I then suck that feed through yahoo pipes to find all the comments that are mine which then generates another feed, which I have included on my friendfeed.
So a couple of noob questions. Is there a better way to do this? Yes I could edit the Pipe every time I leave a comment to add the new feed and this would be neater, but it involves many more mouseclicks. It also means that any Blog that doesn’t have an obvious comments feed (BBGM is the most obvious example, but also Open Reading Frame and a number of others) I can’t do this with. Including, as it happens, this Blog (am I wrong about this, do we have a comments feed somewhere). Can anyone advise whether there are hidden comment feeds on blogs that I am missing? Incidentally for reference the comments feed for any blogspot blog can be found at xxx.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default if it’s not immediately obvious.
I also do a few other things, for instance aggregating all the posts and comments on chemtools blogs that are mine. And naturally my lab book is available through the friendfeed, although at the moment that just shows that I haven’t done any real work for a while…