Information overload is less about having too much information and more about not having the right tools and techniques to filter and process information to find the pieces that are most relevant for you. This presentation will focus on showing you a variety of tips and techniques to get you started down the path of looking at RSS feeds in a completely different light. The default RSS feeds generated by your favorite blog or website are just a starting point waiting to be hacked and manipulated to serve your needs. Most people read RSS feeds, but few people take the time to go one step further to hack on those RSS feeds to find only the most interesting posts. I combine tools like Yahoo Pipes, BackTweets, PostRank and more with some simple API calls to be able to find what I need while automatically discarding the rest. You start with one or more RSS feeds and then feed those results into other services to gather more information that can be used to further filter or process the results. This process is easier than it sounds once you learn a few simple tools and techniques, and no “real” programming experience is required to get started. This session will show you some tips and tricks to get you started down the path of hacking your RSS feeds.
Dawn Foster is the MeeGo Community Manager for Intel with experience and a passion for bringing people together through a combination of online communities and real-world events. She was a co-founder and board member of Legion of Tech, a non-profit chartered with organizing free events for the Portland, Oregon technology community. As part of her work with Legion of Tech, Dawn has organized BarCamp Portland, Ignite Portland and other events. Dawn holds an MBA from Ashland University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Kent State University. She has worked in positions ranging from Unix system administrator to market researcher to community manager to open source strategist. Dawn regularly blogs about online communities as the author of the Fast Wonder Blog, and she is the author of the book, Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy.
