RSS And The Hero Portal

I recently received a copy of “Hero Headlines” which contains news from Hero Ltd, “ the company behind the UK’s official online gateway to higher education and research opportunities “. The newsletter included an article about the new-look HERO Web site, which was relaunched in November 2006.

The article mentioned that the Web site now makes use of RSS. Looking at the What is RSS? page I was pleased to find that RSS is being used not only for news, but also for syndication of feature articles and press releases.

In addition the Web site explains what RSS is and provides helpful advice on using RSS readers. Well done, Hero. (I should disclose, BTW, that I was a member of a Hero Technical Advisory Group, several years ago).

But what else could a national portal such as Hero provide? How about: An RSS feed for search results Direct access to RSS feeds from individual institutions Geographical metadata for pages about individual institutions A Google Maps mashup providing additional information about the institutions An OPML feed which aggregates the various RSS feeds I’ll talk some more about these issues in future postings – but for now I’d be interested in what you might like to see from a national portal. Technorati