Reliability:Do RSS search results match website's search results?
Inclusiveness:Does RSS offer non-staff & archived stories (if also come through website search)?
Key info: Does RSS give headline/summary, date, time, reporter?
Timeliness: Are RSS stories as timely as those from website search?
Excellent
Very Good
Acceptable
Not Acceptable
Overall Score
Reliability
Inclusiveness
Key Info
Timeliness
6. Time
2
THE HEADLINES: Two RSS feeds were used on Yahoo! Pipes: World News and Top Stories. The RSS feed typically returned many of the most recent stories from that came through the same search on Time’s website, whether there was minimal news on the topic for which the search was conducted (i.e. “Sudan”) or more extensive coverage on the search term (i.e. “Iraq”). But the challenge with the Time searches was the odd and uneven manner in which the website dated its articles. Those from the magazine were “future-dated,” while stories from the AP for example carried the date they were written. Therefore a story from “today” could be posted in the search list several pages after the stories written several days previous but which were in the current issue on the stands, which could carry a date as far forward as eight days. Sometimes those future-dated stories came through the RSS feeds, sometimes they did not.
Other Issues:
Most of the stories that were returned through the website were staff-written, but some of the stories were from the AP; the RSS feeds occasionally returned AP stories as well.
Neither the website nor the RSS feed appeared to provide any multimedia through the feeds used, although one could separately search for multimedia on the website.
It was difficult to tell how timely the stories were that came through both, because of Time’s adherence on its site and feeds to future-dated stories.
Search results for the RSS feeds gave the articles’ headlines/summaries. The website searches returned the headlines/summaries and the dates (albeit problematic) of the results.
The RSS feeds were consistent in what they pulled from the website. When 10-12 consecutive searches were run through the feeds, the results remained the same.