FeedShake

What is it?

FeedShake is a website that creates a single RSS feed from multiple RSS feeds. You can also filter out posts that contain specified keywords, and/or filter in posts only if they contain specified keywords. The site is incredibly easy to use (it takes mere moments to create an aggregated feed) and no registration or email address is required.

Similar services are listed by libary clips here. According to Library Clips, “Actually this tool is quite unique as it is the first to do both splicing and filtering…there are many blending tools, but ReFilter seems to be the only standalone filtering tool…here are other general filtering tools.” (Link)

The feed is auto-named “FeedShake” but can of course be renamed in your reader to whatever you want. It would be nice to be able to auto-rename the feed when it’s created so that other users would have the title you selected.

Other current limitations: “This service is beta. Currently it supports RSS 2.0 feeds”

We’d be happy to pay for naming and stats on the feed.

We tested the service by burning a combined feed of TechCrunch and EarningsCast, another Archimedes blog. The feed is: http://www.feedshake.com/feed.php?code=wc5mjf0wz4. The feed works great. Awesome service. We love it.

Screen Shots of “burning” process:

MSN Virtual Earth

What is it?

MSN Virtual Earth is an excellent mapping/satellite imagery application. Much like Google Earth , it is fascinating to look at, and very useful as well. There is no download required (whereas Google Earth has a 10 meg download).

In addition to excellent search features, you can autolocate via your IP address (although I am in San Francisco today and it says I am in Seattle based on IP) or via a small download, which works very well. There is also a scratch pad to keep notes (there needs to be a print function added to this though).

Mandatory first searches, of course, were of my home in Manhatan Beach and my parents home in Anacortes. The picture quality in MSN Virtual Earth was better than Google Earth, and the picture quality of my parents home in Anacortes was decent, whereas Google had nothing to show for them. Overall, MSN wins in this very limited test:

Jeremy Wright posted an excellent review of the service and comparison to Google maps:

“First, MSN’s Virtual Earth is 10 times easier to use than Google Maps. Between the little compass in VE that you can drag and it’ll just scroll with you (instead of Google Maps’ “click, drag, click, drag, click, drag”) and the ability to zoom much more easily in VE (you can scroll, you can hit the +/- keys on your keyboard OR you can double click), this is an app that is much more thought out.�?

“At the same time, Virtual Earth is much easier to use from an “exploring�? point of view. Hop off a plane, hit “Locate Me”, look for rental cars, then look for hotels, then look for somewhere to eat and then look for somewhere to catch a show. Boom, your whole day is planned and in your Scratch Pad.?

IceRocket

What’s New?

We wrote in our previous profile on IceRocket that they were changing their name to BlogScour (based on something Mark Cuban said at AlwaysOn).

Blake Rhodes, IceRocket’s CEO, called to tell me that our facts were not quite right (he also thanked us for the post). They are not going to change their name to BlogScour, but they are going to launch a site called BlogScour that will contain all of their blog search capabilities.

I saw this at Blogherald a few minutes ago (I cannot locate the mentioned SEW article), and emailed Blake to confirm the facts. He confirmed what he told me on Friday -

“Mike-

We WILL launch a site called Blogscour.com. I dont have a date for that. Basically it will be our blog search we currently have minus all the web and image search features we have on IceRocket currently. It is going to be blogs only. Have a great evening.

Blake”

So there you have it.

Personally, I don’t give a damn, I just love their search engine. They could call it searchcrap.com and we’d still use it twenty times a day to research companies.