Tami Reiss

After weeks of talking to people at networking events, tech events, friends, twittering, facebook status updating and google searching, I still couldn’t find the ability to search multiple blog feeds for a specific topic and then have that search become its own RSS feed.

Responses on Twitter included Google Reader, NewsGator, RSSReader, just to name a few. They are all great services that allow individuals to view the newest posts on the blogs that they care about, with bolded numbers to tell the user when they’ve missed something. There is generally the ability to search an individual blog or even multiple blogs for a topic of choice.

There are also a number of readers that you can purchase to have as an application on your computer. I’m not sure why you would want this with the free options out there, but who knows. Additionally, now your company can actually control which feeds they are sending to you. There are new sites out there like Streamy, Feeds2.0 and Trackle which are in Beta testing and might be able to do some cool stuff, but right now they aren’t exactly ready for use. My favorite suggestion was PopBandit, which is now out of business.

So I kept asking and asking different people. When all of a sudden last night, I gchatted a blogger friend of mine to see what she used for aggregating the blogs that she reads. She mentioned that she used to use one site but now like the vast majority of the population, she uses Google Reader. Amazingly enough, the site she no longer uses actually does EXACTLY what I needed. Enter Bloglines.

Reasons I love Blogines:
1) It allows you to subscribe to as many blogs as you’d like. Including the feeds from twitter.
2) You cansearch the whole library of blogs or just your feeds for any topic you choose.
3) You can even use AND or OR functionality to refine or expand your search.
4) Similar to Twitter Search , it then can create a new feed from just your search.
5) Even as you add new feeds to your list, the permalink for your defined search within your feeds remains the same.

Only problem with Bloglines, their TOS isn’t clear about whether or not I can use their technology for my application and either way the new search feeds seem to be protected for non-users. At least I can show my developers exactly what I want to happen, and maybe we can recreate some of the technology.

Hooray for listening to Jason Nazar and continously talking about the techonology I want to create, one never knows where the answer to your questions will come from.