The Intuitive Life Business Blog

171612 Resource 76407 24 24 1181409936378 1197307420085 Controlled Embarrasing and Unintended Relationships Emerge in RSS Feeds -- May Affect Your Brand Reputation

Terry Heaton is a brand and his brand reputation is important. But Web 2.0 creates the opportunity for runaway problems in RSS mashups.

I caught a glimpse of <a title="Nude Nurses Snuck Into Terry's Feed" href="http://www.intuitive.com/blog/nude_japanese_nurses_snuck_into_terrys_rss_feed.html" target="_blank">Terry's problem</a> on the <a title="Intuitive Life Business Blog" href="http://www.intuitive.com/blog/index.shtml" target="_blank">Intuitive Life Business Blog</a> (Dave Taylor).Whenever mass quantities of disparate information are aggregated into one spot, the likelihood of unintended assimilations grow - perhaps exponentially (I'm no math genius). We build and manage a fair number of mashup feeds based on a variety of content sources, but we've learned that (for business purposes) trusted content sources represent the only viable approach to leveraging external content. But even so, there still remains a slight risk of getting bad content. We use Google's API, Google News, and specifically targeted domains to build both internal intelligence and customer-facing content aggregations. Sometimes we use other known and trusted feeds. Our automated (MyST-X) services leverage RSS resources and re-deilver the results as secure (or public) HTML pages and also offer RSS feeds depending on the business requirement. To further manage the slight risk of attracting unintended hits, we provide our customers with a content review process that allows them to jettison any information of questionable origin or deemed unsuitable. Once an item (or domain) is given the boot, our services monitor all feeds (not just the one where the nefarious item was discovered) and never allows the content in. Lastly, we provide specific configuration commands that can be employed to filter incoming content with great prejudice, lowering the risk of poor quality items long before the feed is constructed. In the case of Terry's situation, the <a title="Wikipedia: Semantic Web" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web" target="_blank">semantic web</a> has proven to be not so semantically astute. ;-) It's not surprising - most of us understand why this happens, but what we didn't anticipate was the rapid adoption of "persistent search" - i.e., the ability for anyone to create a search feed that's always fresh with new discoveries. This is a very powerful idea because it provides a way for content to find you in your news reader (instead of the other way around). However, when search feeds are poorly constructed, you're likely to get lots of crap. This represents one definition of a low-quality feed. How does Terry (or anyone or any business) combat this problem? Ironically, the same approach that created the problem, also provides a solution - create an intelligence service based on persistent searches that comprehensively watch for assimilations of your business brand with terms you might not like to see. There are many ways to do this - my favorite is <a title="MyST Blogsite">Blogsite</a> of course, but <a title="Yahoo! Pipes: Rewire the Web" href="http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/" target="_blank">YahooPipes</a> is also a great place to create and manage your own intelligence dashboard. 9 application/xml false briefings Dave Taylor intelligence Intuitive Life Business Blog persistent search RSS mashups Terry Heaton The Intuitive Life Business Blog Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is widely recognized as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. http://www.intuitive.com/blog/index.shtml Terry Heaton's PoMo Blog Postmodernism is a change-or-be-changed world. The word is out: Reinvent http://www.thepomoblog.com/ Yahoo! Pipes Rewire the web. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Dosware Team Internet Browser; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 bfrench 71.196.246.102 false true false false true 174050 false false true false false false true 76407 blog blogsite/Blogsite/web