Latest News via RSS

Topix.net provides news on various topics and provides an RSS feed for the same. There is a similar site called Newstrove.com but topix.net feeds are more accurate, relevant and exhaustive. The advantage of Newstrove is that , it also offer Java Script which can be included in any web page, in case the web server doesn't support XML parsing. The twop indian news sites who have started XML syndications are IndianExpress.com and Rediff.com, I don't know why Timesofindia.com which claims to be the number one Indian news site on the internet doesn't have one. The same is true for Googlenews.com which doesn't offer any RSS feeds. But there are many tools avialable on the net who parse the html to get RSS XML feeds out of them. This method is called "scarping" and it violates copyright, but still there are many tools available and I remember that there was something for Timesofindia.com too.





The convinience which these feeds offer are:


(1) You don't have to visit numerous news/content sites everyday, you can simply subscribe to the RSS feeds.


(2) These RSS feeds generally includes main home page (headlines) and also categorical and topical headlines. Thus I may subscribe only to Cricket feed from Rediff and business news feed from financial express.


(3) These feeds can be viewed in a web based aggregators likes bloglines or blogstreet and destop applicatications like Feedreader.[all are free]


(4) Thus I save lots of browsing time and visit exactly the page whose title has generated interest.


(5) You can also use these topical feeds in your web pages, e.g. a cricket blogger or a web master may show latest headlines in his web page / blog side bar which adds more intelligence to his web page.


(6) Many others things can be done with this syndication method depending upon the creativity, the most interesting I find are blagg and Rollup.org which allows you to subsribe to various syndicated feeds and re-mix them. That is, the headlines are generally shown from one site , then another and then the next one in these aggregators all the individual feeds are randomly mixed and displayed.



To know which sites from India offer syndication you can visit Syndic8.com.