RSS Feeds from ALA?!

December 8th, 2004

I just had another one of my “DUH!” moments. I was writing an article on advanced RSS capabilities and was playing around with some advanced Yahoo news searches. While futzing with the “inurl” parameter I threw in ala.org for the heck of it, to see if any of the ALA web site content was indexed by Yahoo news. Booya!!. By comparing the results to the ALA site, it seems that they are indexing all of the press releases and news that comes from ALA. Basically, all of the content that comes from their page called “News”.

And, since Yahoo has been kind enough to provide RSS Feeds for any search query, librarians can get an RSS feed for any news or press releases to come out of ALA. I’m in heaven. Try out your favorite organization and see if it works. I’ve just added 5 new customized feeds to my aggregator for organizations that aren’t doing it themselves. Now, should this be considered third party scraping if the organization allows their press releases and news to be indexed by Yahoo? I’m not sure. It’s a fine line I guess.

Also, PubSub has a very useful Press Release monitoring system set up, which I highly recommend. Power to the RSS.

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