An open source project to create a great list of feeds for journalists to follow.
Last week Mathew Ingram, a longtime friend and professional journalist, put out a call for feeds for a reboot of his use of RSS. This got me thinking. What if a community created such a list of feeds, and did it over a period of weeks or months, with discussion, and a small amount of deliberation.
We could use the tools of open source to do this project. That's what this project is for, it's a place where we can work on a list of feeds.
The list is available in the standard OPML format for subscription lists. You can use this file to subsribe to all the feeds in any feed reader. It will be updated periodically, so check back. (It's even better if your reader allows you to subscribe to OPML files, a drum I've been beating for a long time. Then you'll get the updates automatically.)
The list is also available as a plain text file.
I've started the list with a small number of feeds I follow, to help seed the process.
The easiest way to suggest a feed is to post a comment here. It's pretty straightforward, I hope. Include links to the feed, or a link to a list of feeds. Let's see how this works. ;-)
If you know how to do a pull request, simply make the changes you want to see, and submit the request. But that can be overkill for a simple project like this one.
I suggest we use the same criteria for including feeds that most of us use for pushing links to our followers on social media or through linkblogs.
A feed is included not because we agree or disagree, all its inclusion means is we believe that an informed person would want to be aware of the perspective or information it provides.
So while we may not be from Freedonia, we will recommend Freedonian news sources. We don't agree or disagree.
I've set up this work with the most liberal open source license. This project can be forked, competed with, repurposed, with or without credit. Do with it as you please.
I fed the list into my River5 software, and now it's producing a river of news from all the sources in the list.
From here who knows what happens, but just getting a list of feeds for journalists to follow, collaboratively, while it doesn't involve much work or technical know-how, would be a major improvement over the way we all do this for ourselves.