Been thinking a lot about RSS lately. I am definitely seeing an uptick in visits to RSSGizmos.com and more blog posts about RSS are showing up in my feed reader. While there are lots of tools out there for keyword-searching RSS feeds, I found myself wanting something to discover RSS feeds with similar content.

So I made something to find RSS with similar content. Does it use AI? No, it’s more mechanical than that. Plug in an RSS feed for which you want to find similar content. The program will fetch the feed and break out all the “mid-level” keywords, ones that aren’t too common and aren’t too specific (I need to work on the stop word list.)

Select the keywords which look the most interesting and the program will search WordPress and retrieve the keyword search results as an RSS feed. The resultant feed sources are shown to you in a list.

You can preview the RSS feeds right inside the result list, or grab the feed URL for your own reader. If you like it enough you can even start over by analyzing it for keywords.

When I was testing this I learned it worked really well with current events. In my experience, news stories tend to move through the blogosphere in waves, with one large initial surge of coverage and then smaller sparks of coverage as other blogs catch up and some followup happens. When you identify current event keywords you can scoop up other sources covering the same territory.

I’m using a CORS proxy to grab the RSS feeds but the program doesn’t use any APIs at all, so I will be able to put it up for everybody to play with. I just want to get the stopwords a bit more right.

Need a name for it too.