Week 4: #9 - Finding Feeds

I'm not trying to be difficult, really I'm not. I was having trouble with this assignment because I didn't want to search for newsfeeds because I don't actually want any newsfeeds. Finally, I thought about the fact that I'm interested in national parks and in landscape photography. So, I tried those search terms in all 5 of the feed search tools. On Topix, it appears that you can search only by location, not by subject. Maybe I'm missing something there. On Feedster, I didn't find any legitimate feeds for national parks. I found over 4300 posts for landscape photography. On Syndic8, I found 4 feeds that were actually about national parks, ironically all on Topix.net. I found 2 photography feeds, not necessarily landscape, though. On Technorati (which one of my coworkers praised in the extreme), I found no actual feeds for national parks. I found a number of feeds and over 12,000 blog posts about landscape photography. My coworker was obviously looking for something different than I was. I was the most pleased with the Bloglines search tool. For national parks, it found 9 good feeds and 68,700 posts, and for landscape photography, it found a number of feeds and 24,900 posts. The truly exciting thing for me, though, was that in the list of feeds, there were also links to Flickr photo pools. This is an awesome thing that I didn't see with any of the other searches. Check out the national parks photo pool at http://www.flickr.com/groups/usnationalparks/pool/. It's gorgeous! And what's even better is that now I'm completely caught up! Plus I did a Flickr badge as a bonus.