Combining tagspaces

Is there a service that will deliver a feed containing the union of tagged items for one tag across a set of various services? For example, the union of:

del.icio.us/tag/astronomy
technorati.com/posts/tag/astronomy
flickr.com/photos/tags/astronomy
connotea.org/tag/astronomy
wordpress.com/tag/astronomy/
…etc…

Easy to do, I suppose, but I don’t want to reinvent a wheel.

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23 thoughts on “Combining tagspaces

  1. > http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=YsGCaFB33BG64rzVTqoASA

    Nice! This is immediately useful, thanks!

    I wasn’t certain all these sources offered tag search as a feed, but you’ve not only shown that they do, you’ve documented the feed URLs which is really useful.

    I wondered about this one:

    http://feeds.technorati.com/search

    Apparently you can instead do:

    http://feeds.technorati.com/tag

    Which is more explicitly a tag search, although this:

    http://feeds.technorati.com/tag/astronomy

    Currently comes up empty for some reason.

    While we’re at it, I notice that you can do this:

    http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=YsGCaFB33BG64rzVTqoASA&tag=biology

    However while that loads the search term (‘biology’), the pipe comes up waiting for the user to hit the Run Pipe button. Is there a way to make it hands-free?

    Hmm…

    http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=YsGCaFB33BG64rzVTqoASA&_render=rss&tag=biology

    Excellent. So here’s what I’ve just actually subscribed to:

    http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=YsGCaFB33BG64rzVTqoASA&_render=rss&tag=grl2020

    I had proposed grl2020 at the library conference I went to last week, was curious to see what stuck to it, and realized that it would be used in different contexts. This is just the view I was looking for.

    A further useful tweak would be to preserve the source services — Technorati, del.icio.us, etc. — which are currently not reported in the combined feed.

  2. A further useful tweak would be to preserve the source services — Technorati, del.icio.us, etc. — which are currently not reported in the combined feed.

    I’ll put in a hack tonight to do that. It’s a simple regexp, I’ve done it for other Pipes I’ve built.

    Any other tag services you want to include?

  3. Helpful tips here, thanks Jon and engtech. I’m looking at ways (and tools) to do this too for Local Signal which aims to combine tagspaces for cities (as well as other searches and apis that aren’t tag based), so that I can offer universal feeds.

    I’ll second the thought that Technorati’s tag search feeds (now just search feeds) have definitely been going through some change/trouble in the past few weeks. Not sure what’s going on there.

    I agree that preserving the source feed is nice. It’s one of the things I really dislike about OriginalSignal’s combined feeds, I can’t easily tell where the post is from.

    As for other tag feeds that I’ve found:
    metafilter
    ask metafilter
    platial
    43things/43places/43people
    youtube

  4. I’ve updated the RSS titles to show the source, but it revealed an interesting problem: each service is using a different publish date timezone. :)

  5. Do you already know Tara Calishain’s Kebberfegg? It generates RSS-Feeds for any given tag, but it doesn’t blend them into one single feed.

    In respect to Technorati’s tag feeds: At the moment they don’t seem to work right, but try this workaround: http://feeds.technorati.com/posts/tag/—–test

    Another tag-feeding blog search engine is Blogdigger, try http://blogdigger.com/search?type=rss&q=subject:test

    @engtech: Great construction!

    @Jon: Reading your blogs and columns since many years, I’m really glad to contribute the first time to a question! :-)

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