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Boris Finds Emerson RSS from Amazon

Just days before packing his bags to leave for the MERLOT 2003 Conference, our humanities learning object Blogger "Boris" gets rather clever. He has found out how to get RSS feeds from Amazon.com on his favorite American literature movement, see object human: Amazon.com Feeds for Transcendentalism

What Boris has found is rather interesting, and completely due to the work of Raymond Yee and his WebNet Talk on RSS.

In a nutshell, Amazon publishes a custom XML for their searches and main categories, and their a transformation of XLST applied to that result, we can get plain, old, simple RSS, that plugs and plays in Boris's weblog and his desktop aggregator.

We would not be surprised if he is sticking inside his Blackboard page as we write.

While Boris's blog is focused on learning objects in humanities, he cannot ignore what else he is able to garner from other sites once they publish summaries of their content via RSS.

What about the Library of Congress? The great museums? the various electronic text archives? Walmart? (huh?) RSS could be everywhere!