Keyword Cluster Units
Because of the limits of Google News - 20 keywords in a single account - I've bundled keywords into top-pevel categories that approximate projects I'm working on - then for shorthand named them "Keyword Cluster Units".
Each KCU is made up of 1-20 keywords which are inserted (by hand) into Google News - the resulting RSS news feed is then available for further processing anywhere.
Example: Current Obsessions - the keyword unit cluster that tracks news which I am interested in blogging about.
cleanfeed, hackers, privacy-internet, virus, censorship-internet, microsoft-security, copyright, drm, riaa, mpaa, piracy-internet, piracy-sea, malware, blacklists, smartfilter, dmca, spyware, exploit, security-internet, censorware.
The major problem is that each KCU has to be maintained by hand - and everytime the KCU is updated then the Google News RSS feed URL also changes - so even minor changes are a pain and a major re-arrangement is a major pain.
The other problem is that Google News ties everyuser to an email address - so for the 5 current KCUs I need 5 email addresses - login into Google News - make the changes and then cut and paste the changed URL.
I would also like to get rid of the "Top Stories" they clutter the feeds with irrelevant duplicate stories ...
It would be great if Google News supported (a) more than 20 keywords for an account, and (b) a method of clustering keywords into categories and then feeding them to category led RSS feeds.
Right now the situation works well for a few Google News feeds - they all come out marked Google News - but by the time I've republished in FeedBurner and re-written the Feed name with the KCU name - the feeds end up marked with both the category name of the keyword cluster - and the keyword itself as a category within the feed.
It works - but its kludgy and maintenance is a pain - and I still haven't folded the stuff from BlogSpace into SyndicSpace yet ..... and all my attempts at online aggregation have led to nothing but online aggravation.
Tags: rss rojo feedburner google news atom Syndication aggregation tagging filtering clustering