Intranet and Portal Aggregator

"The more I talk with 'real people working in real companies' (meaning: not nerds spending their whole days hacking), the more convinced I am that a news aggregator is the ideal center for any Intranet." —Paolo Valdemarin

The entire site (http://klognews.com/) is fundamentally based on the aggregation concept and requirements articulated in Paolo's Weblog post. As an example, emergic.org is syndicated at klognews.com.

To achieve this, we simply had to create a resource in MyST that identifies RSS content as an aggregation source. All other aspects of the process happen naturally through XSLT rules-based models, including style and scheme of the presentation.

The MyST platform addresses each of Paolo's stated server-side aggregation requirements; it also goes a step further in terms of scraping. Scraping is useful in some cases, but is decidedly brittle. MyST uses a scriptable "channel gear" that provides powerful content integration capabilities with things like Amazon's API, RSS, RDF, Google's API, and screen scraping through an xHTML parser. The unique aspect of channel gears is that they are built in concert with our business logic plug-ins (an API for business process scripting involving channels). All items [regardless of their source] fall under the MyST user's security context so search, RSS feeds, etc, all conform to the security and permissions model.