Friedbeef’s Tech

Kudos to The Star Newspaper - The first mainstream Malaysian news source with RSS feeds! FINALLY - I can get all my local news aggregated with the rest of my world news feeds (CNN, BBC) on the single page.

RSS in a nutshell if you’re new to it, is a way to aggregate all the news updates from your favourite sites in a central location, saving you lots of time. Learn more about it here.

It is worth mentioning that the Star Online’s use of RSS is not really new. However, until very recently, it has been a feature restricted to the technology section, so I was pleasantly surprised to see a tiny link on the main page - which led to a page with close to 40 RSS feeds covering practically all sections of the newspaper!

Custom Classifieds Searching

The one big thing which I was really impressed with was the implementation of customised RSS search feeds for the classifieds section.

What this allows you to do is create your own custom classifieds section dynamically updated with only the information YOU want to see.

Type in ANY keyword and select the relevant classifieds category and it will generate a custom RSS feed for your use.

In the example I searched “Honda Civic” under auto & mororcycles and subscribed to the the RSS feed which was generated. Now all the Used Car ads with “Honda Civic” will be displayed to me, and this list will be dynamically updated everytime I check the feed, with my RSS reader instantly bringing to my attention any new Honda Civics advertised. If I’m also considering buying a Toyota or Nissan, I just need to subscribe to their feeds, and I’ve just created my own custom classifieds section which only shows me updates and listings of the cars I’m interested in.

Issues with RSS discoverability

A few kinks are still present with the current setup. The autodiscover feature for RSS is not working properly (unable to discover the correct feed if searched on - and feeds have to be inputed manually) and it’s not Firefox Livebookmark friendly (No RSS icon to subscribe to) .

This makes it slightly user-unfriendly, and is something they have to overcome in order to gain proper user-traction with this feature - especially with the bulk of The Star Online readers probably unfamilliar with the benefits of RSS.

Roundup

All in all, a pretty solid effort, and I look forward to more tech innovation from TheStar which is also experimenting with podcasting, and citizen blogging.

Related Links:

The Star Online
The Star Online RSS Main Page
The Star Online RSS Classifieds
The Star Online Podcast
The Star Online Citizen’s Blog
What is RSS?
What is Podcasting?

Technorati Tags: star, thestar, rss, classifieds, podcast, podcasting, blog, blogging, newspaper, news

If you liked this article, subscribe for free via email , or grab our feed.
  Select RSS reader + Add to Google + Bloglines + Netvibes + NewsGator + My Yahoo! + My MSN + My AOL + Rojo + FeedLounge + Pageflakes + Kinja

One Person Left a Comment