Receiving RSS feeds from sites that don’t syndicate

As I mentioned at the seminar today, smart bloggers try to avoid the “echo chamber” editorial problem by attempting to post on topics that bring something new into the mix. Since your RSS newsreader is full of subjects already being discussed by bloggers, how do you detect interesting new topics? One technique might be daily surfing to non-syndicating sites, but that’s a lot of work.

Few people are aware that tools exist for converting non-syndicated pages into RSS feeds. One that I use regularly is feedfire. Feedfire scrapes the headlines at a designated URL and creates an RSS feed that you can subscribe to. It’s not perfect, about 1/3 of the sites I try just don’t work, another 1/3 sort of work, and another 1/3 work great. Give it a try.