motivated by a few things:

• chris' feed, though mine is not nearly as stylistic as his.
• newsseer is down.
• google news feels like cnn fluff.
• stratfor went pay only.
• i like to surf headlines, and not read past paragraph three.
• i like a lot of information.
• i like worldly information.
• i like to have things come to me, not the other way around.

i hope to get a few more feeds, including incidents.org, securityfocus.com, and the dartmouth its news feed. we'll see if and when that happens (i'd rather just go RSS and not screen scrape).

a useful tool is mark's rssfinder python tool. point it at a site and see what you come up with.

basically i have a machine that reads a collection of sources and section titles and preps up the html. the rss feeds are read and parsed by the python tool (about 50 lines of python, i didn't write it) and uploaded to monkey.

currently i'm testing some new modificatons to the system: the python script i'm using understands rss 0.91, 1.0 and 2.0 well (the perl script only knew rss 0.91) along with some improved "new item" detection and marking the old stuff in grey. once i am satisfied with this new version i'll upload it and make it available.