I worked yesterday on a new feature we’d like to introduce into CScout’s Mobile Trendpool. Right now we have a couple sections on the site that display a list of headlines relevant to people looking at mobile, but it’s a clunky implementation requiring an editor to manually populate the list.

To circumvent the existing updating process, I’ve been working to integrate a river of news type stream from the separate feeds of mobile related websites. This has been a two part process.

First I found a Yahoo Pipe that aggregates content from multiple RSS/Atom feeds, which I duplicated and customized a bit for my own purpose. Basically I just removed everything but the title/headline which is published as a link back to the original post.

Next I grabbed a couple WordPress plugins (linked to on the test page) used for integrating the content. I installed the plugins, then created a page template to hold the code. The Yahoo Pipe outputs an RSS feed, the URL of which I dropped into each plugin. Published, the content is displayed exactly as I’d envisioned.

From the looks of it, the plugins are more than adequate in terms of features/customization for my purpose. Honestly, most of the manipulation happens in Yahoo Pipes. I’ll take another, slightly closer look at both plugins and run with one.

You can see the streams in action on the Aggregator page. What you’ll see are Yahoo News’ science headlines and Google News’ sports headlines. We’re selecting sources for the actual working implementation, but for this test I just wanted a couple feeds that are being updated somewhat regularly.

I showed this system to Rory, who’s also in the office working with Strange Matter. He loved what he saw, and suggested we start building sites that aggregate content similarly to this.

The playing field for this type of thing is occupied, but I don’t think it’s necessarily crowded. What might work would be hyper-local, or at least hyper-specialized streams, meticulously curated.

To take this to the next level we need the ability to parse a feed and add new content to a database. This is another layer of complexity that has to be thought out and implemented. With this next step I’m treading in untested waters, the perfect opportunity to learn something new.

Further out, editors will need the ability to manage their streams through a nice backend at which point the we’ll outgrow the functionality coming from Yahoo Pipes. This is really snowballing…

After working with this more last night and this morning, I’m excited to keep pushing it. Getting into the office, I found Rory rabid about the idea. I think this can work if we implement it right. These days there’s no shortage of projects.

As an addendum, I know I’m kinda giving away the farm here. Thing is, this isn’t new. The value from one of the “accumulators,” as Stan calls them, is in how the feed is curated; no two editors are going to create the same stream.

Yes, there are a lot of other elements required to make it successful, but I’m not going to get that far ahead of myself. Besides, there are others already involved who are addressing some of those aspects.