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Thursday, February 8, 2007

Planet Printmode

One of the great things about RSS and Atom-based content syndication is that it allows users to easily aggregate and mash-up data to create different representations and applications.

I have been playing around with the popular PlanetPlanet (Venus Branch) river of news newreader and created Planet Printmode, a news aggregator for the printing industry. I currently have it setup to grab content from three different topic areas: Printing Industry, Publishing Technology and Media, Advertising and Publishing.

I'm open to suggestions on interface tweaks and site subscriptions. However, this is just a little experiment and I offer it without any warranties. At some point you might find it broken or unusable or missing.

Update 2/10: The Atom feed now only contains a summary of the article (if its supplied by the original feed). I made this change to cut down on bandwidth consumption.

Update 2/15: Planet Printmode now identifies itself using the HTTP "User-Agent" header. It's UA string is: Planet Printmode +http://planet.printmode.net (using UniversalFeedParser).

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3 Comments

  1. This is fantastic Adam. I can just subscribe to this one feed and get everything going on in the world of print. I certainly hope you keep it up. Mind you, the folks at American Printer or WhatTheyThink.com should have jumped on this ages ago.

    Keep up the great work.

    Comment by Peter Renton - Thursday, February 8, 2007 at 05:53 PM

  2. Also see PrintOnDemand.com

    Comment by Thomas D. Greer - Thursday, February 8, 2007 at 10:42 PM

  3. Thanks Peter. I have no plans to remove it unless it becomes a burden. The problem with offering a service like this is that it can be hard to monetize. You would essentially be making money off other people's material (one of the reasons Google News is ad free). I'm just exploring new applications of digital publishing. AP and WTT need to worry about generating revenue.

    Thomas, Most of the news picked up by PrintOnDemand.com is also covered on WhatTheyThink. In order to minimize duplicates, I opted to not include them.

    Comment by Adam - Friday, February 9, 2007 at 11:00 AM