Suprglu

Since we never seem to have enough time when we meet to discuss all the fun technology stuff I run across, I thought I'd start occasionally sharing things I find in the blog. These could simply be things that I find interesting and/or they could be things that you might find useful. Today I'll share Suprglu with you. Suprglu is an "aggregator of aggregators," allowing you to create a web page that pulls content from a variety of other pages, via RSS feeds.

As an example for you to look at, I've created a Suprglu page. When you create your own page, you have a screen where you can add any RSS feeds that you choose. They do have a limit of about 10 or so, which was a problem for our group. (I wanted The Fischbowl, my Del.icio.us feed, my AHS Pictures Flickr Feed, as well as each of your individual blog feeds - that was too many.) So I used another service called RSS Mix, which allows you to take multiple RSS feeds and combine them into one Feed. I then added all of your individual blog feeds to my RSS Mix to create one feed. This works well, but does have a couple of drawbacks. It doesn't always bring the entire post in, sometimes just the first few lines. And it doesn't directly identify who created the post (just indicates it's from the RSS Mix). But if you place your cursor over each blog post, the URL will appear in the status bar at the bottom of your browser window, which indicates who's blog it came from.

So, what's the point? Well, first, I think it's just another example of how technology - and particularly RSS - is evolving to bring information together in new and different ways. I fully expect this to develop further. Second, you could conceivably use this in some fashion for your classrooms. You could create a Suprglu page for each class that brings in their class blog (and maybe from multiple sections of the same class), your Del.icio.us feed, your Flickr feed (if you create a Flickr account), and maybe some other feeds relevant to your subject area you might find (say, the NY Times Science news feed, for example). Unfortunately, if you have your entire class creating personal blogs, that would be too many feeds, so that would have to be back to a feed aggregator like Bloglines for now.