Savvy public aggregation tools, the key to binding your blogs together

This post examines three different public aggregation tools, Drupal, Planet Planet! and Feed2JS and explores the importance of centralized aggregation in facilitating your learning or organizational blogging community.

Added RSS Mix & FeedWordPress

If you’re implementing blogs in your school, college or university or even organization one of the first things you’re going to want to think about is aggregation.

Not, however, the kind of aggregation that most seasoned bloggers are used to (personal aggregation through a tool like Bloglines) but rather the public kind of aggregation where a selection of blogs flow into a river-of-news style aggregator for all to see.

Why? Well, firstly because the idea of individual aggregation is still a long way beyond an awful lot of people and this is a great way to introduce them to the concept (individual aggregation will follow, believe me) and secondly because without it you have a lot of blogs in isolation, all alone and nothing wrecks your blogging project than that sense of aloneness!

But, how to do this? Here are a few of the best options available to you (assuming that actually coding an aggregator is as far beyond you as it is beyond me):

Drupal – Drupal has had for some time now a pretty darn funky public aggregator service, simply enable the module, add your feeds and you have a public aggregator at work. Some people might argue that you can also have everyone posting to their own blog in Drupal and making the front page an aggregator but I’d argue, in most cases, that that isn’t such a smart move (more on that thinking here).

Planet Planet! – Planet quite possibly has the edge over Drupal for the simple fact that it’s dedicated to doing exactly this. Sites using it (like Planet Gnome) can attach all sorts of fun stuff to the feeds and it’s equally feasible to run a simple version as Todd Slater has with Blogs @ Zane state (thanks for the pointer to the software too Todd!) A drawback to some of us will be that it’s python…

Feed2JS – Feed2JS is the creation of Alan Levine (he of cogdogblog) and is perhaps the most straightforward solution available to you right now. What it does very simply is takes any feed and republishes it exactly how you would like it to be, where you would like it to be… just by producing a little bit of script. The perfect tool for importing a blog or blogs into a particular environment (say, WebCT or Blackboard). What this will benefit from is the capacity to insert multiple feeds into one script… giving you as many aggregations as you could want for… and hopefully that’s not too far round the corner ) Equally importantly the code is open source and pretty simply hosted (here’s the IncSub version)

FeedWordPress – FeedWordPress (Thanks Matt ) is an excellent option as well. Created by Charles Johnson because “I needed a more flexible replacement for Planet to use at Feminist Blogs.” Essentially this will turn an install of WordPress into a great big public aggregator… and you don’t even have to go near a database! Here’s a demo I’m working on called professional blogs… enjoy.

RSS Mix – RSS Mix is exactly what you want if you don’t fancy installing all of the above. This solutions great strength lies it the fact that you have to do / install & setup absolutely nothing. Just whack in the RSS feeds you want to feed and enjoy the outcomes. Naturally this also has the problem that if they stop working… so does your feed (but that might be a risk worth taking right now!) Here’s a James Farmer compendium as an example )