Consumer Reports, one of the most trusted sources when it comes to news and product ratings and buying guides now provides RSS feeds. Partnering with SimpleFeed, the site lets you combine feeds for specific topics (cars, home, babies, latest news etc.) to create a master feed that covers topics that you are interested in. Its a nice approach to building a sub domain of topics from a larger bucket of information so you have just one tailored feed from a given source.

Consumer reports provides a host of information within the feed, including relevant articles (nice touch!) and a link back to the site to get the ‘war and peace’ version.

One suggestion that I would make to them is to allow users to name this customized feed. All combinations of feeds are labeled as “Consumer Reports”. It might be hard to remember what feeds I have in my combo menu, a few months down the line.

To see how this feed serving capability performs in combination with our filtering and notification abilities, I’ve set up a ZapTask with the Consumer Reports feed for Babies and asked to be notified via IM when there’s a mention of “Britax” - the car seat that my 16 month old lounges in. The feed validated just fine so I don’t see why I shouldn’t be getting an alert one of these days.

All in all, RSS just makes a boat load of sense for the type of content that Consumer Reports serves up and the implementation is dead simple requiring little or no RSS know-how. Congrats to the Consumer Reports team on joining the RSS bandwagon.

[via RSS Blog]

[tags]Consumer+Reports, RSS, ZapTXT, Britax, SimpleFeed[/tags]

Cheers
Sameer

Tags: Cool ZapTXT uses, RSS

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 12:59 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.