If you don’t use them already, you should know that two of the more awesome RSS tools are FeedBurner (now owned by Google) and Yahoo Pipes.
FeedBurner gives you a huge amount of control over your RSS feeds. Whether you use other Google products or not, FeedBurner hooks in very easily. For me, I use it to allow people to subscribe to my blog by Email digest or any RSS aggregators (see the link on the top-left).
As for Yahoo Pipes, it’s probably the coolest product Yahoo offers. It allows you to combine and customize (sort, filter, truncate, etc) a variety of RSS feeds from various sources. Today I used the interactive tool to create the Champlain News aggregation and it can be seen in the attached photo. As you can see, I’ve combined 13 separate Champlain College related RSS feeds, limited the amount of news that comes from individual feeds (so that you are not overwhelmed by one source), and sorted the results by date to ensure the most recent news is at the top.
Once you’re done with your Yahoo Pipe, you can create a widget (like the column of on the far-right side of this page… or you could even take it a step further and channel it through FeedBurner. Combined these are extremely powerful tools for getting a handle on the unending stream of information flowing from the internet, allowing you to see only what you want and share your filter with others.
Best of all, both services are free to use!
