MixedContent

Just got a ping from Nader Cserny about the bandnews.org site. All in all, I’m impressed. The idea is that most band websites do not push out RSS feeds (all though I’m trying to change that!), so the smart folks at bandnews.org wrote a bot to crawl band pages and publish RSS feeds for those artists’ sites. At bandnews, after creating an account, you can add a number of artists to your profile (a ‘watchlist’ of sorts), and then receive a combined RSS feed for those artists. They even have a little desktop client (windows only it seems) that pops up alerts as they come in.

I do have a few quips and suggestions though…

• With pubsub, technorati, google news alerts, RSS readers etc., it seems like a lot of this could be done with existing tools, albeit without the flair and ajax goodness of the bandnews site.
• The RSS feed that is generated is headline only, and I would find this much more useful if it contained the full article in question.

Final thoughts:
I think this is a really good start, but what I would like to see is user interaction. Bandnews is an aggregator of interesting musical content, now lets see a community (built with Drupal of course!) around it. I want to see what bands other users are watching. I want to see which other users are watching the same bands I am. I want to know what the most watched bands are. I want to see tagging for bands. Boris and myself have often talked about how cool it would be to see a ‘43bands’ (in the style of 43things and 43places). Bandnews is pretty slick the way it is, but by adding some more community features, I think bandnews could become something really great.