Robin Good defines a new profession:
The newsmaster is an individual capable of personally crafting RSS-based specialized information channels by utilizing technologies that allow hir to select, aggregate, filter, exclude and identify quality news, information, content, tools and resources from the whole universe of content, news and information available on the Internet.
Newsmastering is the ability of a human being to concert, orchestrate, edit, and refine quality search formulas that tap into the whole Internet content universe and beyond, and that filter out relevant information through selected keywords, source selection, ranking, heuristics, and many other possible criteria
The Newsmaster specializes in crafting uniquely powerful search/aggregation/filtering formulas generating continuous RSS feeds on narrowly selected topics by:
a) Resource identification. Selecting and aggregating valuable resources (like a normal aggregator does)
b) Query formulation at different levels and on different content bases.
1) Creating advanced search queries in the blogosphere ( a la Bloglines
2) Creating advanced search queries on the traditional Web content at large
3) Creating advanced search queries on the overall pot of content derived at
points a), b) and c) and generating new highly filtered RSS feeds matching
specific content and quality criteria.4) Creating advanced search queries to the deep/invisible Web with dedicated
tools and creating RSS content out of the results obtained.f) Filtering. Applying exclusion filters based on keywords, keyphrases, date, language, and more.
g) Splicing (union): I want feed C to be the result of merging feeds A and B.
h) Intersecting: Given primary feeds A and B, I want feed C to consist of all items that appear in both primary feeds.
i) Subtracting (difference): I want to remove from feed A all of the items that also appear in feed B. Put the result in feed C.
l) Splitting (subset selection): I want to split feed D into feeds D1 and D2, according to some binary selection criterion on items.
g) Heuristics. utilization of heuristics allowing the system to learn from previous choices the patterns characterizing the most appropriate news items from the rest.
i) Reputation. possible utilization of real-time collaborative filtering mechanisms allowing the newsmaster to benefit also from the rating and reputation given to selected news/information items by other independent newsmasters.
f) Personal selection. The ability to integrate in the newsmastering workflow the ability to personally select information items or to continually improve and refine the governing search and aggregation formulas by way of personal evaluation.
