Travels with Paddles

a sea kayaking journal

Axel Schoevers (Photo: A. de Krook) Name:
Axel Schoevers
Location:
Rijswijk, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands

Friday, November 19, 2010

Filter Feed

In the Netherlands kayaking is rarely picked-up by the media. And when it does, it is usually because of an incident, like ours on June 13. In the days following, a lot of us were frantically checking the news sites for any coverage.

I thought of what would now be a modern variant of the gathering of newspaper clippings. How to weed through massive amounts of news agency RSS-feeds for kayaking related articles?

By coincidence I stumbled upon on Yahoo Pipes. It allows one to unite an unlimited number of RSS-feeds, throw away all duplicates, filter the remaining stream by using selection criteria and sort the results. I could never foresee that it would be that simple!

Well, the only 'problem' I have is that what I mentioned at the start of this post. My kayak keywords rarely get a hit. Today, one to be precise. And that one is from the RNLI. Just look at the NEWS HEADLINES box in the left pane.

Maybe if I would add 'all' the RSS news feeds of the world I would get some more hits, but I think I keep it to the Netherlands and the UK for now. I think we got hit enough this year.

1 comment:

Axel said...

Currently the news feed got 'unexpected' hits on:
- Vulkanoloog (Volcanologist)
- Kanon (Cannon)
- Kayaki (Region in Afganistan)

So bare with me that the keyword tweaking will be a continuous process and some 'false positives' are inevitable. At least it proves that it does detect!