Robin Good is an independent online publisher who works out of Rome, Italy. He is the editor of MasterNewMedia.org (on new media generally) MasterViews.com (visual presentation for international audiences) and Kolabora.com (online collaboration). He also publishes the Communication Agents Journal and is the producer-director behind the first open-source movie about blogs, TheWeblogProject.com.

Robin has worked for the UN, World Bank, FAO, CGIAR and the Arab Planning Institute in developing complex online information systems and multi/language web sites. His work today focuses on empowering individuals to sustain themselves ethically through creative use of new media.

Robin Good is the leading evangelist for the creation of a new type of knowledge worker - he calls them Newsmasters. The role of a Newsmaster is essentially to subscribe to the RSS feeds of a large number of news sources, search queries and other dynamic resources. The Newsmaster then filters the results of the subscriptions with a combination of machine automation and topic-specific expert knowledge. The most important information resulting from these filtered subscriptions is then delivered to end users, either by RSS, email, on a web site or by whatever delivery is most appropriate.  Central to the concept is that one person should be responsible for filtering information for others in a group or community.

The responsibility of a Newsmaster is to turn information overload into pure value; thus vastly increasing the recipients' efficiency, access to information and ability to respond to key events quickly.

To hear Robin explain the two following paragraphs in his own voice and words, click on this play button    (1:30)

Robin told me that Newsmastering is all about acting as a curator of the huge new stream of information that is coming to us every day. There is so much constant information that it is obviously very difficult to keep up with everything and thus the decision often comes down to "What can I afford to not read?"

He says that information overload needs to be tackled in an effective, intelligent way. Newsmastering is a new role that fills the need to scale up in order to digest all this information. Society has increased the number of media forms and the number of people who contribute to those information streams, but we haven't increased the number of hubs where this information can be aggregated and filtered in an intelligent way. People serving this function can increase every one's efficiency and access to the most important information by delivering only what is most relevant for any given field or organization.

Newsmastering is an emerging concept, and the first movers are evangelizing a new vision. Most of the work has been done to date with custom systems, patching together tools, often free. The key technology in the process, though, is Really Simple Syndication - RSS.

Newsmastering can be as simple as splicing multiple RSS feeds together into a mix with a tool like FeedDigest.com. The next step in sophistication is to filter your feeds and be specific in your sources. More complex topics require strategic choices in sources and filters.

Lest this appears as simple as just finding interesting things on the internet, Robin points out that not just anyone can be a good Newsmaster. The most important qualities to have are passion and competence in the particular field being covered. In order to select, edit and manage the real information gems in any sector, a Newsmaster must have a deep familiarity to recognize news and resources in their proper context.

One of the primary activities of a Newsmaster is to subscribe to the RSS feeds of searches for key terms and phrases. Searches that are too broad will bring in too many results and require too much processing to extract the best information. Instead, Robin advises subscribing to many highly targeted searches that will bring you just the kind of results that will be useful.

A good search subscription may not deliver any results for days at a time, but when results do arrive they will be of high value. A well informed Newsmaster should be able to determine what phrases are likely to be found in the most valuable documents online and make good guesses about phrases that would be valuable if they were found in the future. A quiet search subscription will sit silently in your feed aggregator until a result is found.

In other words, the creation of many small pipes that only bring the best information is a better strategy than creating big pipes for the immediate psychological reward of many results. The creation of those queries can be done by thinking about what key words or phrases are most likely to be found in the really good content in your field.

When setting up a suite of queries on a topic of general interest, Robin recommends the following "universe of sources."

1. News search: News.Yahoo.com is Robin's preferred source for news search RSS feeds.

2. Blog search: Technorati.com is Robin's preferred blog search feed source and he suggests that you consider subscribing to tag searches instead of or in addition to full text searches.

3. Social bookmarking: From human, through machine back to your human eyes again - harness the power of everyone else's research by subscribing to feeds in del.icio.us or digg.com [I would also recommend Furl.net for some subjects.]

4. Industry Press Releases - Many companies only know to put their information out via a press release. The best place to subscribe to a query feed according to Robin is at Newspad.com, which uses press releases from PR Web.

The above sources could be complimented by more topic specific sources of information as well.

I asked Robin whether there was a clear Return on Investment for organizations dedicating resources to the creation of a Newsmaster position. He acknowledged that there is not a quantifiable ROI but said that the role fulfills an undeniable and powerful purpose in serving stakeholders. The aggregation, editing and delivery of the most high-quality and timely information on a particular topic will help those stakeholders overcome their sense of information overload, will build prestige for an organization offering this kind of information service and aggregate a body of high quality content that can be used in traditional newsletters, online or in briefings and research.

The concepts here are part of an emerging space where early adopters are breaking new ground and evangelizing while the tools develop. Many of the tools available to Newsmasters are experimental, they sometimes cease functioning when overwhelmed by too many users, for example. For every feed manipulation tool that fades out of existence, it seems two more appear in its stead and are more capable, professional and supported. Robin says he enjoys the "carousel" of tools available as its an incredible opportunity for innovation. There is some risk with investment in experimental tools in this space, but the risk is mitigated by the fact that RSS is an open source format that won't leave users locked into any particular vendor.

Robin emphasized that purchasing an inexpensive software solution that claims to automatically deliver you the best news on your topic is no substitute for a good newsmaster with the right software. Machine discovery and selection is of far less value than the unique power of a well-informed human mind combined with a flexible software strategy. For those interested in Newsmastering software suites, Robin recommends looking at mysyndicaat.com and Hexamail's News2Web.

I told Robin that some of the tools I'm most excited about right now are those that use RSS to offer alerts in conjunction with IM and SMS. I asked what emerging tools he was most excited about and he said that he believes feed creation tools to be a key area of innovation underway. Tools like feedyes.com, Ponyfish.com, Mail2RSS.org and one of the most established in the class, FeedFire.com. These tools let you create an RSS feed to subscribe to updates from sites that don't offer their own feeds.

The landscape of tools and best practices for mining the living web appears set to continue developing rapidly for as long as the risk of information overload is an issue. Hopefully Robin Good's MasterNewMedia.org will remain a key resource for engaging with these issues for a long time as well.

Robin Good is the editor of MasterNewMedia.org, MasterViews.com, and Kolabora.com. He also publishes the Communication Agents Journal and is the producer-director behind the first open-source movie about blogs, TheWeblogProject.com. You can subscribe to the feeds for all of Robin's projects and future interviews here at Net Squared by importing the following OPML file into your feed reader. Bloglines users must save this file to their desktop, then follow the path MyFeeds, Edit, Import.

RobinGoodNetSquared