24
February
2005
|
04:58 AM
America/Los_Angeles

A Yahoo for RSS? Nooked Directory collects corporate RSS in one resource

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher.com


Fergus Burns, CEO of Dublin-based Nooked, gave us a heads-up on tomorrow's launch of the beta for the Nooked Directory. It's essentially a Yahoo! for corporate RSS feeds (Yahoo! as in browsable, searchable listing of resources organized hierarchically).


"An RSS directory focused on corporate feeds is needed to make it easy for people to discover RSS feeds -- at present the only way of discovering RSS feeds is fragmented. For example, the recently launched Microsoft Presspass feeds were originally mentioned on a blog." That would be Scoble's rant -- "if you do a marketing site and you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired" -- which mentioned in pasing the existence of the MS feeds.

Fergus believes that a central, well-organized database of corporate feeds will be helpful to several audiences -- sales, marketing and communications execs; PR firms and ad agencies; and journalists and analysts.


The site also serves a marketing role for Nooked, which provides RSS generating services to corporations and PR firms, "to make people aware of who has RSS feeds in the corporate space. The directory will also assist

the whole RSS community in demonstrating the types of companies and

organizations that are adopting RSS."


There are about 300 feeds right now, which seems a bit light although Fergus notes that they are adding more every day. I found the hierarchy a bit standard, not particularly tweaked to the content of corporate RSS. For instance, the home page view doesn't list technology as a category (it's under "Business"); it does have Arts & Humanities as a top-level category but has only a handful of feeds there.


Fergus says, "Nooked Directory is beta at the moment - our goal is to get early feedback from the community with the hope that the community starts to submit RSS feeds for consideration, to build the complete RSS directory of corporate feeds."

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