The other day, I was browsing through an old Linux Journal and learned about Planet - an RSS aggregator. Planet works by slurping in RSS feeds, and spitting out what appears to be a single blog.
I've actually been using their software for quite some time - as it's what one of the main Scheme Blogs runs to provide a community weblog.
As I was thinking about uses for this software, it occurred to me that it would actually make for an interesting team building tool. If I had an organization larger than myself and my wife, I'd probably be taking the following concept to my supervisor:
Why don't we have everyone in the organization, from CEO to unpaid-intern, submit a single RSS feed that they find valuable. We can then host a single internal corporate blog using Planet.
Benefits of this little project?
- You get insight into folks personalities by what they choose
- You help to create a cross-pollination environment where people learn about other's jobs in the organization. This could foster respect and spark new ideas.
- It would force everyone in the organization to finally learn about RSS and get into this blog thing
This last point may not be such a big deal these days, but even a couple years ago, I was running across executives who didn't grasp the RSS/Blog world.
Come to think of it, there are probably lots of uses for an aggregator like this. Hmm....
Update: You should also check out Twittertim.es. It not only does aggregation on the fly, but attempts to determine your best feeds by looking at who you follow on twitter. It's slick stuff.
We used to use Planet but last year one of the guys "upgraded" to some custom code that spits everything out right on our homepage.
ReplyDeletehttp://spiderlogic.com/
I always find the it interesting to see so much FP stuff on there :)