The NewsGator Feed Archive Service
In his post titled Feed Archaeology Charlie Wood writes about the little known NewsGator Archive Service. NewsGator has archived all the RSS feeds that its users have subscribed to since it started. Since it only archives feeds that users subscribe to, there isn’t a spam / splog problem in the archive.
If your blog magically disappears (like Charlie’s did (due in his case to a server that died) you can easily recover it from the NewsGator Archive Service. In addition, if you use FeedBurner for your feed, your readers might not even notice.
For the nerds among you, here is the one command (assuming you have curl installed) that Charlie needed to recover his blog content.
curl http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/svc/archivesvc.asmx/GetFirst \ -d xmlurls=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2Fmoonwatcher \ -d numItems=100 -d sortAscending=TRUE -u uname:pword
hi
Nik,
The archive is available via API, it's not made available on our website but if you send me an email at jeffn at newsgator dot com I will make sure you get access to this. The second part of your question addresses a future capability we are building out, analytics based on the "attention data" that accumulates on top of a feed and the individual posts. Within the next 30-45 days we will begin exposing that aspect of the archive so please stay tuned.
Brad,
This is great news.
One quick question, does Newsgator open its archive to developers to utilize thier Feed archives to do any sort of analysis similar to how developers can utilize Alexa index?
Thanks,
Nik
Hey Brad.
The NewsGator archive service URL you used above prompted for HTTP authentication.
If you need access to feed archives you might also look at using Spinn3r.
http://spinn3r.com
We go beyond just normal RSS feeds. There's a LOT more here necessary than just RSS. Many RSS feeds don't include full content don't have a classified language, etc.
Kevin
Kevin – you need to have a NewsGator Online account (free – 30 second set up) to access the Feed Archive Server.
They are seriously considering doing this.
What if they could use that content in an unstructured data search engine that feeds of categories and taxonomies? Leverage of the information at hand could be phenomenal.