Robin Good explains http:// www.mysyndicaat.com To Vance Stevens on June 3, 2007 Camtasia voice recording corrupted but GoToMyPC screen shots preserved from which these slides were made

We start at http:// www.mysyndicaat.com

Robin logs in …

We’ll create a new Feedbot

We give it a name and click on Feed Properties: Edit

We need to set some advanced features first

The advanced features sub-window opens …

Robin says it works best with 4-word titles (in his experience with this program)

He also enabled digests (for Newsmastering at a later stage)

Click Next to move on …

We’re about to add a subscription to our feedbot but first we need to find a feed

We conduct a Technorati search at http://www.technorati.com . This is an advanced search feature now in Technorati.

We have some results and click on View all to expand the list

Here we find the feed link and copy it to the clipboard

The feed link is pasted in the URL address and there is an option to Test it

Here’s the result of the test, so we can see it works fine.

Click OK to proceed …

The subscription is listed as one of the feeds in our current feedbot

We’ll add a second subscription now

We’re ready to subscribe to a new feed but we need to find one first

We try a news feed from Yahoo

There are no results but there could be hits here later. So we copy the feed URL to use it in our feedbot.

The new feed is pasted to the URL Address, and we click OK.

We see here that the second feed has been added

We search http://del.icio.us/tag/wiaoc and find that the page has an RSS feed

With the feed link in the clipboard, we create a third feed subscription

The feed is added. We click OK.

As in the other cases, the feed appears as a subscription in our feedbot.

Robin suggests we try http://www.digg.com/ But there are no results in this case  We didn’t take the time to add it but would have normally

Robin shows me how we can add feeds from blogs where we think the tag might appear – here we have selected http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/ and right clicked on its feed.

We prepare to add this to our list of feeds

Only in this case, we’re going to filter the output for only the search term we wish to aggregate.

We select Filter Posts, and then Edit …

We enter the search term and decide to search only in the past two months. According to Robin, this is an absolute time, fixed on the date the filter was created.

We click OK twice to accept the filter and the update to our feedbot, and see that the subscription is again listed (as a filtered one).

Yet another possibility is to use http://blogsearch.google.com , and this in turn produces an RSS feed which can also be subscribed to.

It’s time to save our work

Having saved this, we can find it in our list of feedbots

We can also use content from a CMS, such as http://www.webheadsinaction.org

We can View Posts to see what the feedbot is has pulled in so far

The list of feeds harvested is already a long one

The Syndicaat output itself produces an XML (RSS) feed, whose URL can also be copied

This URL can be shared. You can subscribe to this feed in your bloglines or whichever aggregator you use.

There are more ways you can use this feed. We can find out about them if we re-visit the advanced features.

First we need to turn on the HTML Rendering Options, and click on How To

Here we see many ways how this feed can be embedded in a blog or web page.

and some further options …

Robin was particularly excited about the Newsmastering capabilities of this application. I was about to learn why we had enabled digests at the outset.

In the feed viewer, individual items can be selected to be included in the digest or not .

To publish the digest, you click on the button with the finger on it …

Then the Update Digest option appears.

You can refresh the subscription check here

Finally, Robin showed me how Newsmastering could be fine tuned by editing the way each digest selected would appear in the feed produced.

Edit the title for example …

… or the author name

Save … You can find out more about newsmastering by following this link .

When your changes don’t appear you should Refresh Viewer, where the finger is pointing.

And there it is!

And thank you Robin For an amazing keynote at http://www.webheadsinaction.org/wiaoc2007 and for taking the time to show us how to aggregate effectively