Getting Localized With RSS
June 4th, 2005Brian Chin blogs about the new Seattle Intelligencer Webtowns RSS Feeds. I love this!
My new area of interest these days is localized news and how this type of information can be delivered to the people who care about it, the citizens. This is not a new idea at all, but the issue intrigues me. Making RSS mainstream (I’m not sure it is yet) means making it more personalized than it is now, and Webtowns may just be the type of tool we need. Another fabulous tool is Topix, which Gary has been raving about for a while now. I use it all the time and don’t rave about it as much as I should. When I demo Topix to workshop attendees by asking someone to tell me their zip code and then displaying local news from their town (and get an RSS feed for the results), I usually hear some oohs and aahs.
In another move to bring local content to users, Greg introduced Blogdigger Local this past week. Add to that the government page we at PubSub released this week (which enables citizens to read about their local politicians) there are now a plethora of tools to use to not only find deep local content, but have that content distributed via RSS.
Again, this is not a new idea, but we seem to have more tools available to make the idea a reality.