Katie Couric, via search feeds

Yesterday, my editor at Poynter Online, Bill Mitchell, asked me for ideas for covering how Katie Couric's debut last night as the new CBS Evening News anchor is playing online.

Well, I honestly didn't watch her show last night. I was really tired and went to bed early. I almost never watch TV news anyway. However, the net is indeed abuzz with commentary and more about Katie Couric this morning.

When I'm trying to follow buzz or monitor conversations or topics online, one of my primary tools is to set up a group of search feeds.

Many online services allow you to save a search as a feed (what the geeks call "RSS"). This is helpful because then you'll receive in one place (your feed reader) a fairly organized, chronological list of the latest content that matches your query terms. In other words, you don't have to keep looking for new results -- they keep coming to you. At the Society of Professional Journalists conference a couple of weeks ago, I listed search feeds as an indispensable tool to help reporters cover a beat or a specific story.

If you haven't ever used a search feed, the current Katie Couric buzz provides a great example. Since she's famous, her name shows up in all sorts of places. However, this is also a not-so-great example, because searches for her name turn up so many hits that it takes considerable sifting and fine-tuning to make a meaningful assessment of what people are thinking or saying about her.

This morning I assembled a collection of search feeds for the query "Couric" drawn from nearly a dozen online sources. Only one of these directly represents mainstream media (sort of, it's from the CBS Couric & Co. blog). The rest are mostly from sites that aggregate mostly non-MSM content, such as blogs.

Search feeds are a great way to follow the "live web." First-generation search engines such as Google and Yahoo crawl the web, index much of its contents, and deliver results based mainly on relevance. Often, older content makes the top of the list. In contrast, web 2.0-focused services such as Technorati quickly index new content that gets delivered to them by feed, so their results tend to be more up-to-the-minute than Google (although often more varied in relevance).

So if you want to find out what people are saying about something right now, look to Technorati or any of the other sources I've used below -- not Google or Yahoo.

Here's my collection of Katie Couric search feeds, and a sample of current results from each...

NOTE: I used the free tool RSS-to-Javascript to display the content of most of these feeds here. These results will continually update, so don't be surprised when you see that content change. Also, I take no responsibility for any of that feed content. You'll probably see spam, obscenities, and irrelevance. My only goal here is to demonstrate search feeds. They're a great tool, but the content they deliver is always a mixed bag.

1. Technorati: The leading blog search engine. Aggregates feeds from millions of sources -- mostly blogs, but also other content.
   Most recent results:
   
2. Bloglines: A popular free web-based feed reader service. This feed is generated by results from members' feed subscription lists.
   Most recent results:
   
3. Digg: Users of this service nominate stories from mainstream media, blogs, or elsewhere. The more people who "digg" a story, the higher it ranks.
   Most recent results:
   
4. Newsvine: Another news aggregation service, somewhat similar to Digg.
   Most recent results:
   
5. Podzinger: I wrote about this earlier for Poynter's E-Media Tidbits blog -- it searches the audio portion of podcasts and videologs.
   Most recent results:
   
6. YouTube "Couric" tag: This aggregates any video that a YouTube user has tagged with "Couric." You can also search full description text on YouTube for more results, but they don't let you generate a feed from a search query, only tags.
   Most recent results:
   
7. Blinkx: Another video search engine. Contains a mix of mainstream media and independent content.
   Most recent results:
   
8. Del.icio.us "Couric" tag: The most popular social bookmarking service. People save links to pages and categorize them with self-designated tags.
   Most recent results:
   
9. BlogPulse: Another blog-focused feed search engine. Not as comprehensive as Technorati, but offers some interesting features such as conversation tracking.
   Most recent results:
   
10. BlogDigger: Yet another blog-focused search engine, with its own set of intriguing features.
    Most recent results:
    
11. Couric & Co.: The official blog of the new CBS Evening News. It publishes comments.
    Most recent entries:
    

Finally, it's fun to check out recent edits to the Wikipedia page on Katie Couric. And you can scan Ebay for all things Couric for sale.

...So, like I said, search feeds offer a mixed bag -- especially when your search query is a hot celebrity name. But the more specific your query, the more useful this tool becomes.

What do you think of this? Please comment below.

Comments

[Pat Bitton]

What I don't understand is why anyone would have any interest in this. Ms Couric is a newscaster. Presumably she's reasonably good at it or she wouldn't have been hired. Female newscasters are hardly a novelty in this day and age.

Personally, my preferred source of news is the BBC International News, which is rather more balanced and analytical than any news broadcasts (or "shows", as the newcasters seem to insist - rather tellingly - on calling them) I've seen on network television.

[Marjolein Hoekstra]

To Pat: although I very much understand your point, Amy's post is not so much about the uniqueness of Ms Couric per se, it's more about which resource channels Amy recommends using when you want to stay informed about a certain topic, about a person, about an event or about a breaking-news headline.

Amy, I like how you build up a set of keyword filters from generic sources like feed search engines, social bookmarking sites, Bloglines (the #1 web-based feed reader) and then also add news from the very source: the CBS News blog.

The next step would be to publish your list so that others can subscribe to your collection. If you add, modify or remove a search feed, subscribers would be notified about it. I've done something similar by collecting blog feeds and topic streams about RSS Technology. I'm still very much in the process of finetuning this digest every day. I cherish it so much that I nicknamed it RSSonate. If you like you can see it live in the sidebar of my blog CleverClogs (http://www.cleverclogs.org).

Even with a sophisticated set of filters you may still come across stuff on the web that your filters apparently have missed. I resolved this challenge by 'catching' those items on a dedicated del.icio.us account called RSSonate. The bookmarks to the del.icio.us account are then syndicated and again published to the main reading list. A couple of people, folks who also enjoy scouring the web by bookmarking RSS-related posts, specifically assign the tag for:RSSonate, thus causing their selection to automatically show up in the feed as well.

Hmm, this has almost become a mini-post in itself—I suppose I got a bit excited.

[Giovanni Guardalben]

Our content aggregation/filtering/digesting tool is free for everybody. Try it at http://www.mysyndicaat.com
You can combine, machine- and manually- filter the aggregated content and republish it as a feed.
Giovanni