The shutdown of Google Reader was only a few days ago, and one is increasingly getting the feeling that RSS has had its day as a format for transmitting content on the web. This is nonsense, of course, because even if Google does not see a future for its RSS product, this does not detract from the still fascinating possibilities of Really Simple Syndication, i.e. the standardized transmission of short blocks of content. Still, what happens to the millions of RSS feeds that every blog, nearly all web services, many magazines, and most news sites automatically generate?
A lot of questions that have been going through my mind over the last few weeks. But why reflect on that on a food blog, you ask. Rightly so. Almost.
Because from these considerations (and a Domain lying fallow for many years) within some days a new project developed: Gourmetfreuden.de. A news aggregator for foodies. The said RSS feeds of currently about 150 blogs and magazines are monitored, as soon as a new article appears somewhere, it is displayed on Gourmetfreuden.de and provided with a time stamp. New articles push older ones down. News is a river, not a lake. The only primary distinction that is made in the frontend is the division between German-language postings and international articles.
In my niche of the web, there are aggregators for everything from tech news to German-language blogs, important and weighted social media news via Twitter (this project was also conceived in parts by me at the time) – only for the topic of food there are no current developments.
A few days ago, I initially only drew attention to the new project via Facebook. In the first 48 hours alone, more than forty new blogs signed up, and of course I added some of my favorite publications myself for the launch. You can already work quite well with this basic stock.
Technically, this is not that complex, in principle it can be solved quite well using WordPress and a whole range of plugins, assuming a fast server.
However, there are a few ideas to experiment with further. Especially the semantic recognition and categorization of content. Assuming that with Gourmetfreuden.de in the future an increasingly complete, collaboratively created list, with all relevant food blogs, the automatic categorization helps to find content by topic. For example, you can find all postings in which asparagus was processed. Or in which cooking was done with sous-vide. Or recipes around pasta, pizza, burgers. Or articles dedicated to purely vegetarian products. In principle, this function can also be used to write together in blogs on certain topics and collect all content in a central location.
Or sorting by calendar days. In this way, a statement could be made about the articles written per day, but also about the topics and products written about. This in turn can then be related to the seasons or, of course, the seasonal availability of individual products.
In addition, you could of course also display the social media resonance per article, i.e. the number of tweets, Facebook likes, Google+ etc.. However, this would require a stronger focus on the respective detailed pages of the postings, currently I like the idea of directing all traffic to the respective blogs much better. After all, Gourmetfreuden is primarily intended to be a service for the many creative food bloggers as well.
In any case, a first start is now made, we will see how this project develops…
