Given I’ve already linked to Tony Hirst twice this week I thought I’d make it a hat-trick. Last month Tony wrote two blog posts which I thought were particularly instructive for magazine publishers organising blog awards.

In the first post Tony complained after seeing Computer Weekly’s shortlist:

“Why, oh why, don’t publishers of blog award nomination lists see them as potentially useful collections on a particular subject that can be put to work for the benefit of that community?

“… There are umpteen categories – each category has it’s own web page – and umpteen nominations per award. To my mind, lists of nominations for an award are lists of items on a related topic. Where the items relate to blogs, presumably with an RSS feed associated with each, the lists should be published as an OPML file, so you can at-a-click subscribe to all the blogs on a list in a reader such as Google Reader, or via a dashboard such as netvibes. Where there are multiple awards, I’d provide an OPML file for each award, and a meta-bundle that collects nominations for all the awards together in a single OPML file, though with each category in its own nested outline element.”

I’d suggest something even more simple: an aggregator widget pulling together the RSS feeds for each category, or a new Twitter account, or a Google Reader bundle.

In a second post the following day Tony finds a further way to extract value from the list: use Google Custom Search to create a custom search engine limited to those sites you have shortlisted as award-worthy. His post explains exactly how to do that.

Tony’s approach demonstrates the difference between story-centred and data-centred approaches to journalism. Computer Weekly are approaching the awards as a story (largely because of limitations of platform and skills – see comments), with the ultimate ending ‘Blog publisher wins award’. Tony, however, is looking at the resources being gathered along the way: a list of blogs, each of which has an RSS feed, and each of which will be useful to readers and journalists. Both are valid, but ignoring either is to miss something valuable in your journalism.

Google Reader’s ‘Bundles’ feature – which allows you to share a selected collection of your subscriptions in a range of ways – has been around for 10 months now, but as I’m asking my students this week to use it, I thought I’d blog a quick how-to and why-to.

Traditionally, to share your Google Reader subscriptions you’ve had to know how to export and import an OPML file. To share a specific selection of those subscriptions you had to know how to edit an OPML file (clue: use a text editor).

OPML also has the disadvantage of not making it easy to see at a glance what subscriptions it contains.

Bundles, on the other hand, make it pretty easy to do all of the above. It will also:

• Create a specific page showing the latest headlines from the selected feeds
• Allow others to easily add those feeds to their own Google Reader
• Embed those feeds on a widget on another website (javascript support required, i.e. not WordPress.com)
• Allow you to email it
• Create an, er, OPML file

For my own purposes, it’s especially useful because I normally ask students to submit a screenshot of their RSS reader subscriptions for their Online Journalism assignments as evidence of their newsgathering (along with their Delicious URL and a logbook of sources). This saves them that process – and a bit of printing.

Frustratingly, it’s not the easiest feature to find and use. So here’s how you do it:

Step 1: go to ‘Browse for stuff’

You’ll find it under ‘Your stuff’ (see image, left).

Step 2: click on ‘Create a bundle’

The main area should now change to ‘Discover and search for feeds’, with the ‘Browse’ tab selected. Look to the right of the suggested bundles to find the button that says ‘Create a bundle’ (normally on the right hand side).

Step 3: drag and drop the feeds or folders you want to share into the dotted box

Your feeds should be visible in the ‘Subscriptions’ box in the left hand column of the screen (under ‘Browse for stuff’, ‘People you follow’ and ‘Explore’. If it is hard to see your feeds under all of that, collapse those sections by clicking on the ‘-’ box next to them).

If you are dragging a folder of feeds, the title will be automatically filled in for you. Or you can choose your own, and add a description.

Click Save, and the main area will change again to give you some options to share your new bundle.

Step 4: Share your new bundle however you like

Having written this post I discovered another that would have saved me the time (and includes a nifty way to share folders by simply clicking on the drop-down menu to the right of a folder and selecting ‘Create a bundle‘ . Check it out to see more images while I bang my head on the desk…

In addition to the usual reading list I give to students on the new MA Online Journalism, I also provide an OPML file of around 50 RSS feeds they should be subscribing to – broadly, 5 feeds each in 10 categories.

I thought I should make it available here, so: here it is.

The idea is that a) they get instant access to up-to-date news and analysis of a range of relevant areas; and b) it introduces them to the concept of RSS, if they don’t already know about it, and how to share OPML files.

It seems a no-brainer that we should be doing this on all courses.

Oh, and if you think there are better feeds, let me know.

Here’s a very useful tool if you come across an article that gives you a whole bunch of RSS feeds you’d like to subscribe to – or, indeed, if you’re writing such a post yourself.

Nicholas Rapp’s post on recommended infographics feeds is what got me started on this. Wasn’t there an easier way than copying every single URL into my RSS reader?

There was: OPMLBuilder.

OPMLBuilder takes a webpage, finds all the RSS feeds listed, and allows you to create an OPML file with it.

(An OPML file is basically a list of RSS feeds in a format that makes it easy for RSS readers to import and export. If you wanted to change RSS reader, for example, without losing your RSS feeds you could do so by exporting your feeds as an OPML file and then importing them into your new RSS reader. You can import numerous OPML files without losing older imports)

This is how OPMLBuilder works:

1. Enter the URL of the webpage with the RSS feeds (make sure it is the individual post rather than a blog homepage)
2. Click Get Links – the box below will be filled with a list of RSS feeds
3. You’ll probably have to edit that box to remove unwanted RSS feeds – e.g. those from the site hosting the post. The best way is to find the first RSS feed you wanted and delete everything before it; then find the last RSS feed you wanted, and delete everything after it.
4. Click Create OPML
5. A new page will be created which doesn’t look like much – it will be blank apart from a line like ” Created by FeedShow OPML Builder: Mon, 06 Jul 2009 11:01:12 +0200″ (if you have a browser which doesn’t like XML it may not display at all). However, this is the OPML file – you can see the real content by right-clicking and selecting ‘View Page Source’ (or similar)
6. Save the page to your computer as you would any other webpage.

If you were writing the list of RSS feeds for a post yourself you could skip steps 1 and 2 and just type the links directly into the second box (although it may be easier to publish, then get the links in the normal way). You can then include a link to the OPML file on your post.

In case you want to know how to create an OPML file of your blogroll, there’s some info here.

In case you need to know, this is how you then import an OPML file into an RSS reader:

1. Go into Settings (top right in Google Reader)
2. Click on the Import/Export tab
3. Click on Choose File
4. Find the OPML file you’ve just saved and click Open
5. Click up Upload
6. You should now be subscribed to all the infographics feeds in that file

There’s a great list of RSS feeds for infographics news over at Nicholas Rapp’s blog, which I’ve belatedly discovered. It’s thoroughly recommended – but copying and pasting them all into your reader is a bit of a chore – so I’ve created an OPML file of them all which you can import in one graceful motion.

Here’s the OPML file

And here’s how you get those feeds into Google Reader (the process should be pretty similar in other RSS readers):

1. Save that OPML file to your computer (right-click on that link, and select Save As…)
2. Go into Settings in your reader (top right)
3. Click on the Import/Export tab
4. Click on Choose File
5. Find the OPML file you’ve just saved and click Open
6. Click up Upload
7. Hey presto! You should now be subscribed to all the infographics feeds in that file

I’ll blog about how I did this in a future post.

3 weeks ago my class of online journalism students were introduced to the website they were going to be working on: BirminghamRecycled.co.uk – environmental news for Birmingham and the West Midlands.

The site has been built by final year journalism degree student Kasper Sorensen, who studied the online journalism module last year.

In building and running the service Kasper has done a number of clever, networked things I thought I should highlight. They include:

• Creating a Delicious network for the site – every journalist in the team has a Delicious account; this gathers together all of the useful webpages that journalists are bookmarking
• Tweetgrid of all journalists’ tweets - again, every journalist has a Twitter account. This pulls them all together.
• Twitter account @bhamrecycled
• Kasper sent the whole team an OPML file of subscriptions to RSS feeds of searches for every Midlands area and environmentally related keywords. In other words, journalists could import this into their Google Reader and at a stroke be monitoring any mention of certain key words (e.g. ‘pollution’, ‘recycling’) in Birmingham areas.
• He also shared a Google calendar of relevant events

The site itself is clever too.

• The About page has a list of all contributing journalists with individual RSS feeds.
• In addition, each author has a link to their own profile page which not only displays their articles but pulls Twitter tweets, Delicious bookmarks and blog posts.

Kasper wanted to explicitly follow a Mashable-style model rather than a traditional news service: he felt an overly formal appearance would undermine his attempts to build a community around the site.

And community is key. When unveiling the site to the journalists Kasper made the following presentation – a wonderful distillation of how journalists need to approach news in a networked world: