Week 4 : Exercise 2 : Thing 1 - Finding a Feed

Of the four search engines to find a news feed, I found Syndic8.com the hardest to work with. In actual fact, I didn't really spend much time trying to find anything, because the layout was so foreign to me. The search and results pages are very cut back and basic - for example, the results didn't show an excerpt from the feed referenced, so all I had to go on was the title. For me, it didn't feel worth it to drop into each one, just to see if it was right... I need clues on that results page!

This may be because Syndic8.com seems to be a more user-based directory of feeds. Of the other three, they were all what I expected, but the one I most liked was Topix.net.
I thought Topix.net's interactive graph of search results was fantastic, as a visual representation of that news item's "life" in the public conscious. The graph above shows after a search for "rugby world cup" - as you can see, news began around the end of December last year, and peaked when the cup began, going into September. The graph is also interactive, so you can click on any part of it to see what that topic's news items were at any time.

Innovations like this, present access to a wide range of information additional to what I searched for, and allow me to access the same topic in other ways. It is graphical, easy to interpret, and simple to follow. And it is small! I think this is hugely important, because I don't have to scroll through to get information, and it doesn't interfere with what I originally searched for.

I'm quite a fan of this thing! I wonder if the library could use anything similar on the website?

--UPDATE-- Oh, and I reckon one of the best places to find new feeds is in your neighbour's blog! Well... in the blogs you're interested in, anyway! There are often links to other blogs, and from that, to other blogs... and so on...