SimplePie is a free PHP-based code library that lets you import and parse RSS feeds. The codes allow you to mash up multiple feeds, sort items and clean up data. You can then use CSS and other HTML methods to display items any way you choose, freeing your site from the restraints and style pitfalls of 3rd-party widgets. SimplePie features extensive documentation, tutorials and forums.
Yahoo Pipes provides another way to fetch, manipulate and export feeds. It features a graphical user-interface that is fairly easy to learn, even for someone without programming experience. You can import feeds, sort items, filter by keywords and add tags.
One great feature of Google Reader is the ease of tagging stories within any given feed. Another great feature is the ability to turn your tags into RSS feeds. Combined with SimplePie and Yahoo Pipes, Google Reader makes it a snap to add curated "human touch" links to Newsbobber.
Delicious is a great way to tag and share links. It's a snap to grab a link, add tags and then stream the link into an RSS feed for sharing across the Web.
MySQL is an open source database management system. It's hugely popular and fairly easy to learn, at least for basic applications.
PostRank measures engagement metrics for blog posts and feeds, tracking such things as comments and upvotes on social media sites. The service allows PostRank users to filter a feed to show only the "best" or most popular posts. PostRank also can take a group of blogs and rank them by their recent level of engagement across the Web. Newsbobber uses that service as part of the Minnesota Blog Directory ranking system.
Outside.in geotags local news and blog posts. Outside.in for Publishers allows media outlets and others to curate and embed neighborhood news on their sites. Outside.in is in action on Newsbobber on the Neighborhoods page.
21 January 2010 | 6:11 pm
HYPERLOCAL BLOGGER - If you’re a Minnesota local blogger, it looks like a good place to be listed and perhaps get some extra exposure.
28 December 2009 | 8:42 am
MNPUBLIUS - Ed Kohler: My blog started as a political blog, but I lost interest in politics as a theme over time and surely will again. Lately, my inspiration actually came from Newsbobber.com.
16 December 2009 | 4:28 am
MINNESOTA DAILY - Former PiPress-er Bob Ingrassia’s aggregation Web site, Newsbobber, which culls information from all sorts of local outlets, blogs included, garnered the interest of Minnesota Public Radio, who recently hired him to create something similar for them.
7 December 2009 | 3:09 pm
THE DEETS - I recently took a tour of the 100 Minnesota based blogs that make up the Newsbobber 100 to get a feel for what people are writing about in this state, and came away with a few observations regarding media relations.
15 November 2009 | 7:59 pm
STAR TRIBUNE - MPR plans to beef up NewsQ with a news aggregator brought by new hire Bob Ingrassia, a former Pioneer Press metro editor who more recently worked at Internet Broadcasting, a St. Paul-based digital media company.
23 December 2009 | 1:22 pm
I've added a bunch of blogs to the Minnesota Blog Directory, which now features entries on more than 940 sites. I've also updated popularity data for most of the blogs and recalculated the Newsbobber score for every site. So there's an updated list of Minnesota's Top 100 blogs. The list has changed quite a bit since I first created it last summer. Some of top blogs weren't in the directory when the initial list came out. Other top-scoring sites have been in the directory for months, but until recently did not have accurate or updated popularity data. Once I updated...
28 October 2009 | 7:46 am
Newsbobber is headed to Minnesota Public Radio. I've taken a job with MPR and Newsbobber is part of the deal. So Newsbobber will not survive in its current form. Instead, elements of Newsbobber -- and certainly some of the ideas behind it -- will become part of MPR's Minnesota Today, a new web venture and content-sharing project. My job will be to help create, launch and run Minnesota Today. I'll be focused on the web side of the project, trying to build a robust and engaging hub for Minnesota news, culture and buzz. Minnesota Today also includes a plan to...
24 September 2009 | 8:53 pm
Not long after I started building Newsbobber, I knew I would have to tackle Twitter someday. My feeling is that any aggregator site aiming to become a go-to source for news, information, buzz and entertainment must have a Twitter component. That's more true today than it was even a year ago, when launching a Minnesota news aggregator was just a gleam in my eye. The fact is that anyone who wants to be truly plugged into a city's news, politics and civic life needs to know what's happening on Twitter. In the past few weeks I finally tackled Twitter. My...
29 August 2009 | 4:50 pm
I've built a system to rank blogs and the first version is up and running. The rankings are a work in progress, but the initial list of top blogs is interesting for sure. As far as I can tell, no one else is ranking Minnesota blogs like this. So far, I'm using four metrics: Google PageRank, inbound links measured by Yahoo, Google Reader subscribers and blog rankings from PostRank. I've built an algorithm that mashes those four metrics into a score from 1 to 10. I'm sure I'll be tweaking (or overhauling, I suppose) the ranking system as I see...
15 July 2009 | 9:12 pm
My seed of an idea for an "annotated blogroll" has blossomed into the Minnesota Blog Directory. The impetus was necessity. When I first started building Newsbobber, I spent a lot of time looking for good Minnesota blogs. I did what I suspect a lot of people do: I perused the blogrolls of bloggers I liked. I also searched for directories or lists of Minnesota blogs. Initially, the best list I could find was one maintained by City Pages. That list proved daunting and somewhat frustrating. There are hundreds of blogs listed, but the only information provided is the blog's title....