Newsflashr

At last month’s North Shore Web Geek Meetup, I met Gal Arav, the creator of Newsflashr (and formerly creator of InstantBull):

Newsflashr aggregates feeds from a large number of news sources, and lets you scan the headlines from those feeds as a tag cloud (what are the interesting terms which appear frequently in the headlines in those feeds) as well as in a list sorted by Alexa rank.

It’s the kind of site you can spend a lot of time in, if you’re a news junkie, playing around with different sorting options and looking for trends in the data.

Here’s the tag cloud, for example of the “elections 08″ topic as I am writing this post:

You can also switch into feed view, in which case you’re arranging feeds on a grid, as you might in something like pageflakes or netvibes.

Worth a look if you’re a news junkie or just obsessed with the upcoming election.

Automated Import to Dopplr from TripIt

I use both TripIt and Dopplr, as each is better at certain things than the other.

In my ideal world, the act of forwarding a travel confirmation to TripIt, which establishes a trip, would also create the same trip in Dopplr, which my Dopplr badge, news feed on Facebook, Fire Eagle account, and lifestream would then share with the public, abstracting the details of flights and hotels and such. (Not that I’m terribly worried one could discover them, but just to simplify as Dopplr does well, so that only those who actually want to connect need to get to the details).

That possible crept a bit closer as Dopplr announced the ability to subscribe to your Google Calendar and learn your trips from it.

For some time, Dopplr has been able to export trips to calendars; TripIt can also adds trips to a calendar, but does so in a much more precise fashion, actually adding the flight info and such.

[Update: I had originally posted that the format Dopplr expects is different enough from the one TripIt produces that the two cannot be linked. I was wrong - they can be.]

To link your TripIt account to your Dopplr account, log in to TripIt and locate your iCal feed on your “MyTrips” page (click on the green ICAL feed icon):

Then, log in to Dopplr, go to “Your Account” and choose “Import trips from external calendars.”

Paste in the address of your TripIt iCal feed and Voila! – automated import of TripIt trips into Dopplr.

The logic is smart enough to notice where you already have trips, and not double book you in Dopplr.

Very cool. Now all I need is an Action Stream plugin for Movable Type which notes actual travel segments, so that I can add “John flew from Boston to Austin” to a day like today on JohnEckman.com. I suppose I could write one that checks the iCal feed from TripIt once or twice a day, and creates an action only when the travel date matches today’s date?