stealthprojectbunker is my semi-professional but non-company-specific slack hangout.
It contains many #intel- channels.
The point of these #intel- channels is to aggregate new ideas. I’m attempting to help me/us stay on top of the latest research, news, industry developments. I once heard academic conferences described as a marketplace of ideas. The #intel- channels are the Bloomberg Terminal of the Idea Marketplace. This is in contrast to a place like reddit, where lots of discussion happens around ideas that has been around for a while.
stealthprojectbunker uses several ways to aggregate this information. Mainly RSS feeds and IFTTT applets, but also the atticus bot, email scrapers, etc.
Yes! Absolutely! I think Slack can be a super great aggregator because it mixes automated feeds and manual postings.
Sure, ping me and we can chat, and I'll send 'em an invite.
Atticus the Hipster Slackbot.
Atticus keeps you on the cutting edge of your interests. Yes, we've automated the First Mover Advantage
During my time as a Stanford PhD student, I was effortlessly familiar with the latest developments in Computer Science. It was effortless, since people came to us and told us about their latest work. All I had to do was show up for lunch. The benefits of being on the bleeding edge is extensive. I would like to stay familiar with the latest developments in my areas of interest, but I no longer have the community-by-default of campus life.
How do I keep track of the work produced by people, publications, and organizations?
There are as many approaches to the problem as there are sources of this data. On the one end of the spectrum lies syndicated news organizations. In the middle lies email digests, reddit and hacker news pages, conference proceedings, etc. And at the obscure end lies personal webpages. These days much of this data is tied into social media, especially twitter.
I'd like a push-based, flexible system. I believe Slack might be the current best framework to build a solution for this problem. That's the system described in this document.
Organizing Feeds into Channels
I organize feeds by interest. I use the convention that #intel- channels have automated feeds posting data.
Mute channels that you don't want notifications for
Many blogs and news sources provide RSS feeds: a continually updated list of theeir content. RSS feeds are natively supported by Slack. Add RSS feeds to channels as follows:
/feed subscribe <URL>
RSS links can be hard to find. I use a Chrome Extension to find RSS feed links: "Get RSS Feed URL"
Youtube Channels provide RSS feeds! This is a great way to keep up to date on high quality content, such as new university courses.
You can manually find the RSS feed for a channel using the following URL: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<CHANNEL_ID>. You can find the CHANNEL_ID from the URL of any channel:
You can also download an OPM file containing all RSS feeds for your subscriptions. Go to Subscription Manager. Find this button:
IFTTT ("if this, then that") can connect a large set of online services to Slack. It makes it very simple to connect services to Slack, but it doesn't have much customization options.
It works especially great if you want to monitor a search, such as Craigslist, for new results.
I use IFTTT.com to monitor Craigslist searches. First, customize your craigslist search appropriately. Here's an example of searching for 4+ bedrooms in a subset of SF neighborhoods.
Then, create an applet in IFTTT:
Atticus is designed to cover the non-mainstream areas of the internet. Things like personal webpages (No RSS feed, no IFTTT). Atticus will post to the slack channel of your choosing whenever something happens in the dark corners of the internet.