At BV Capital, we like to stay up to date on what's happening on the
Internet. As more and more information becomes available in RSS format,
whether it is through blogs, news sites or other sources, we find it
invaluable to peruse many of their feeds to stay on top of recent
developments, trends and discussions.
Due to the incredible amount of information that's available, it
is a challenge to consume all the great content that is of interest to
us. At the same time we felt that it would be worthwhile to find out when
new
websites are coming online, whether it is to offer a new service, start a
blog that we would like to follow or announce a new company. RSSDigest is
a very small first step into that direction.
So we came up with RSSDigest -- it is just a little tool to help us
"digest" a number of feeds in order
to quickly identify "new" domains that are linked to in the feeds we
monitor. Two things are important to note about this tool:
- How do we define a "new" domain? Well, when we ran RSSDigest for the
first time, all domains were "new" to the tool and showed up in the daily
digest report. Once a domain has been linked to in one of the feeds we
monitor, it will not reappear when it is linked to in another feed - the
domain is now "known" to RSSDigest.
- We just look for new domains or subdomains, not for new individual
pages. This is equivalent to saying that when we find links to other
domains, we cut them off after the top-level domain identifier such as
.com, .org etc.
This is very much a work in progress, and we would love to get any
feedback you
may have. Tell us what you think about the service, whether maybe you know
a better way to go about this or what you'd like to see as an additional
feature.
Also, if other people find this tool useful, we'd like to continue
working on it so that you can set up your own account and monitor the
feeds you are personally interested in. Let us know if you'd be
interested!
All feedback can be sent to Christian Leybold at
Have fun playing with RSS Digest !
- What is RSS Digest about?
For a general overview and introduction, pls see here.
- What feeds do you monitor?
You can see the list of feeds here.
- How do you decide which feeds you monitor? Can I suggest
others?
The list started out with my personal OPML file and I keep adding
feeds...please let me know if there is a feed we should be watching and I
will happily add it to the list.
- Why do I see very common domains which have been around for years
in
your report? I thought you only show new domains.
The "memory" of RSSDigest consists only of the domains that have been
linked to at some point in the feeds we monitor after we started this tool
mid-March 2005. Given limited history, it is therefore very possible that
common domains can show up in the report, but this should decline over
time as RSS DIgest's domain knowledge improves.
- Why is there an Alexa box with every link?
For certain sites, it is interesting to us to see whether they are growing
and to get an idea of how much traffic they generate. Alexa provides a
great tool for getting a first rough idea of those metrics.
- Why is there no Alexa rating for the specific subdomains, such as
someblog.typepad.com?
Since Alexa only provides data for the top-level domain name (as far as I
know),
unfortunately it is not possible to provide a graph for subdomains.
Last update on March 23rd 2005 by Christian Leybold
