I’ve become a beta-tester on Platial. The RSS feed tool seems to work better on the testing side of the site, although it is still somewhat quirky. The screenshot shows what you get once you submit a feed – in this case, the atom geo-referenced feed from the Pleiades Project. Now, what I would’ve expected, is that Platial automatically extracted the geographic coordinates for each item in the feed, and mapped it. That’s not what happens – rather, the Platial tool is expecting that you’ve added a feed that doesn’t contain geographic info (say, a list of church suppers in your area), and then you punch in the address, city, state, or lat/long coordinates. Now, that is indeed a handy tool for non-georeferenced feeds, but defeats my purpose. At least for today.

I’ve also tried using automatic feed generators for third party sites, things like Feedity on Archaeology magazine’s archaeological news page with Platial, and with Yahoo Pipes. I’d like to see where in the world things are happening! To date, not much success (Feedity tosses in advertisements which – I’m guessing – cause problems). I suppose were I handy with coding etc I could make it all work… but again, that’d be defeating the purpose.