Blending feeds
For various reasons you may want to create feeds that are a direct mix of two or more other feeds. For instance, if you produce four different feeds from your organisation you may want to offer people the choice of those four individually or all together. Or you may want to create a feed for your users of the top ten medical journal TOC RSS feeds. There are a number of tools that allow you to do this. One of the simplest is RSSMix. A more recent and more powerful innovation is Yahoo Pipes. Some of the RSS editor software that you can buy (e.g. feedreader) may have scripts that you can use to do this too.
Be careful of intellectual property issues - if you blend two feeds and then call it your own feed this could be classed as "passing off" someone else's work as your own.
RSS Mix
Go to the RSSMIx home page http://www.rssmix.com/ and past in two or three RSS feed URLs (e.g. those below) into the box there,
then click on the "Create" button and it will give you a new URL corresponding to your new mixed feed.
Doing this with (eg) saved searches doesn't always work quite as you expect because a) the different feeds (from Pubmed, Scopus, WoS etc) have different ways of outputting the references so they look different, and b) they all have different update frequencies (daily, weekly) and updates occur at different times.
Yahoo Pipes
This is a more powerful (and complicated) tool. Go to the Yahoo Pipes page http://pipes.yahoo.com/. You will need to login with your Yahoo id. I would advise you to do some reading before trying it. The basic idea is straightforward, but it takes a little while to know what to do.
Further information
There is a further list of services at AllRSS.
News about Yahoo Pipes - see also the links to further comments about Pipes.
A Librarian's view of Yahoo Pipes (with link to tutorial).
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