I love news. I’m a news-junkie. I could flick between the rolling TV news channels all day. The advent of RSS and its slow but steady adoption by news and media-gathering sites on the Net allows for the opportunity to bring to the masses *automatically* the very latest breaking news on any subject under the sun. When I discovered how easy it was to do this with WordPress and its plugins (I use FeedWordpress for the RSS) I was intrigued to turn a few of my parked domains into news aggregators.
The funny thing is, all the ones I chose have been of the subject that has seen massive stories over the last week or so:
NorthKoreanThreat.com was always going to be topical as long as the rogue nation continued to flex its muscles with its missile testing. But then came the detention of the two US journalists. Then yesterday, August 4th, former President Bill Clinton swooped in like Spider-Man and plucked them to safety, and hopes were raised of a warming between nations. Keywords Bill, Clinton and North Korea are still in the trending Top 10 on Twitter as I write.
American Idol is one of the world’s most-watched shows so I thought IdolPulse.com would make a decent news aggregator site for AI afficionados. Plenty of news about new season auditions, contestant music releases and the sad death of Alexis Cohen last week. And then Bam! Original judge Paula Abdul announces on Twitter that she’s leaving the show!
I set up SwineFluNewswire.com shortly after the initial Mexican outbreak and thought it would go the same way as bird flu (remember that?) Instead, H1N1 has fluorished and there’s barely a nation or age group that has not been hit. And the chances are it’s going to get far worse before it gets better. To balance the news sites, I’m also feeding in from the World Health Organisation and CDC’s RSS feeds, so the press releases are direct as they are published. There’s also Keyword filters such as countries, vaccine-related articles and so on.
With UltimateMotorsport.com I thought I’d tap in to the massive motorsport fanbase, with news from Formula One, Moto GP, NASCAR, Touring Cars and much more. Then came Felipe Massa’s horrific accident with flying debris and suddenly… one of the biggest sport stories of the year – the return of King Michael Schumacher to take Massa’s place! I couldn’t have predicted that one.
MovieTrailersDirect.com does exactly what it says on the tin – the very latest movie trailers all on one page as the film companies release them. Many big movies have been released over the summer months, including Bruno and the latest Harry Potter.
As a domain investor and trader (see pfDomains.com for my portfolio) I’ve come across several superb domaining newswires, so I thought I’d set one up myself at DomainDizzy.com. It feeds from all of the top domainer blogs and news-gathering sites plus main media such as BBC, CNN, newspapers and tech sites. When I noticed domain broker sites such as Sedo and GoDaddy had RSS for their latest domain auctions, I added DomainDizzy Auctions as a sub-category, with filters by company and TLD.
Finally, an honorary mention must go to the Keira Knightley Newswire at KeiraWeb.com. I’ve been the author of KeiraWeb since 2003 and it has grown into the most-visited, most trusted site for news on the Oscar-nominated British actress Keira Knightley. It prided itself on being a news site from Day One, compared to every other site which were 99% photo galleries – and still are. Yes, she’s one of the world’s most beautiful women, but she’s an actress, damn it, not a model. Now, the addition of the live newswire allows fans to get the latest Keira news automatically, even when I’m too busy with my domains to update the main site!
I use the stupendous TweetLater.com to compose, save and schedule tweets about the breaking news across my sites on Twitter. Posts can be republished as close as every two hours, and a convenient dashboard manages the replies, comments and Direct Messages that come from them.
Special thanks go to Bruce Marler, whose post on mini sites here made me decide to give it a go. They’ve not been without their quirks and so kudos to my server hosts at HostGator for sorting out the odd problem in a timely and efficient manner. Now, what other breaking news is just around the corner…?
PS: I have six domains on auction today at InterNext’s Adult domain online auction. Domains include AsianBabeVideos.com, ExplicitGames.com and BigTeenGirls.com. Please see this page of pfDomains.com for the full list and bidding details.
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