RSS feed for Torley's Tips of the Week

An RSS feed for Torley's Tip of the Week videos (linking to the lo-fi (in-world) version of each video) is available from

http://artfossett.net/sl-tip-of-the-week/rss.xml

just in case anyone finds this useful. I had to create the feed by hand (well kinda by hand - I used the RSS-xpress tool at UKOLN to do it). Does a feed for these videos already exist somewhere?

I needed the feed because I have a generic(ish) tool for selecting and playing an in-world video from an RSS feed of available videos - it's what I use for the Teachers TV demo on Eduserv Island.

It'd be good if the RSS feed could be generated automatically in some way from the content of the Wiki (or vice versa I guess) but I'm not sure that is easily do-able?

Other news just in...

I've added an 'Other Second Life news' section to this blog (see the bottom end of the right-hand panel). This is somewhat experimental and might get removed again. I've done it by aggregating about 20 other SL-related feeds using Blastfeed (one of which is a Yahoo Pipe to select the SL-related postings in the eFoundations blog), then embedding the resulting RSS feed here using the standard Blogger 'layout' tool.

Blogger limits the number of posts it shows to the 5 most recent - which, given the rate of traffic on the aggregated feed, may well be too few. We'll see. I'd be interested in feedback on this feature.

BBC news keyword installation in the Avon Gallery

This has been around for a while but I haven't got round to mentioning it...

I put together a little SLashup exhibit in the Avon Gallery on Eduserv Island a while back. The piece consists of about 100 random colored balls, each of which carries a word taken from the BBC 'world news' RSS feed.

Each ball updates itself after a short random period, changing both color and word.

The words are selected via a server-side Perl script that grabs the BBC news feed, parses it into individual words, removes stop-words, then chooses a word at random. The feed is cached to reduce load on the BBC site - without this the script is quickly treated as a misbehaving robot and blocked by the BBC Web site.