Week Four, Thing Nine

So today I checked out sites that collect news feeds, specifically feedster.com, Topix.net, and technorati. I have to say I wasn't all that impressed. Overall, it seems the most current RSS feeds are often generated and listed first whereas relevancy to my topic was often low. I searched the same topics on all three sites, namely Barack Obama, Democratic contender for the 2008 U.S. Presidential race, and whippets, a breed of dog similar to greyhounds.

Feedster did allow you to sort results by relevancy and that did improve my findings somewhat but I still wasn't all that intrigued by the results.

Topix.net listed results from a wide variety of news sources; newspapers, television news sites, public radio, online magazines etc. but the hits, again, were not all that relevant. They most often just mentioned Obama in passing.

Technorati allows users the option to search through blog posts, tags, or blog directories. I was pleased to see the option but I don't know how much it helped me as the top three results for whippets were all written in Dutch. Did those Dutch writers mean whippets the dogs, whippets the aerosal whipcream spray, or some other usage of the word?? What I did like about technorati is that it sorted the results by format, so you could tab into blogs that matched your search, photo and video results, music, people, and events. The event section was especially useful for my Barack Obama search as it gave me various meetings and gatherings across the country by people who want to support this candidate.

I guess what it boils down to is that (in this particular attempt) I didn't find information that useful to me. I think I tend to have a handful of trusted sources that I like to turn to for information, news, and entertainment, and some of the random sources generated by the RSS collectors did not seem that interesting or trustworthy. I remain interested but unconvinced.