Google News Timeline is an interesting tool where you can browse historical events, current news, movie releases and other kinds of information in a graphical timeline.
For instance, you can search for TIME magazine on Google News Timeline and it will display a list of all issues of the magazine in chronological order (arranged by date). Click any of the TIME covers to open the corresponding issue on the TIME website.
For researching current events, you can select News from the drop-down, type in some topic (e.g. india-pakistan) and hit go to read what the mainstream media has published about the topics in all these years.
Use Google News Timeline as an RSS Reader
The Google News Timeline format is pretty handy for navigating blog archives but the problem is that it is a search based service.
For instance, you have to search for something like "labnol" or "digital inspiration" to add this blog to the Google timeline but if the blog’s RSS feed is not available in Google’s index or if Google has trouble locating a feed using your search terms, you can’t read that blog or website inside Google News timeline.
But there’s a very easy workaround to this problem that should help you add just about any website (that has a feed) to the Google News Timeline.
The trick is that instead of searching for the blog name in Google News Timeline, you just specify the RSS feed address (as shown below) and the corresponding content will automatically appear in the Google News graphical timeline.
http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/?subs=blog.<RSS_Feed_URL>
For instance, if I were to add my blog directly into the Google timeline, the URL would be something like this:
http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/?subs=blog.http://feeds.labnol.org/labnol
To read multiple blogs using the Google Timeline in one go, you can simple separate the different feed address using %2C as shown below:
http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/?subs=blog.<Feed-A>%2Cblog.<Feed-B>%2Cblog.<Feed-C>
To catch this in action, click here. What you then see on your screen is a mixture of five different feeds (Digg, Twitter, Techmeme, Hacker News, DI) – some people will definitely find this timeline interface more convenient especially when following a small number of blogs.
Also see: Read Blogs inside Google Docs
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-news-time-as-rss-reader/9089/
Tags: Archives, Most Popular, rss, timeline, tutorial, yahoo pipes, Internet
Reader Comments
Thanks for taking the time and showing the timeline and how you use it. The tip on the RSS feed is great and have set up one for my wife who is a teacher. She is going to show her classes how to do it and use it as a tool to teach.
Myself I have over 350 and counting blogs in my rss feed and running that through Yahoo pipes to get what I am looking for on a daily basis. Amit thank…
Written by Steve Moore on 06.15.09
That’s pretty neat. Two things, I couldn’t get to see the timeline on DI using the term “labnol” and also what’s up with those tiny image thumbnails. I don’t know what purpose it serves on those narrow columns.
Written by DemoGeek on 06.15.09
Thanks for taking the time and showing the timeline and how you use it. The tip on the RSS feed is great and have set up one for my wife who is a teacher. She is going to show her classes how to do it and use it as a tool to teach.
Myself I have over 350 and counting blogs in my rss feed and running that through Yahoo pipes to get what I am looking for on a daily basis. Amit thank…
Sorry, forgot to add great post! Can’t wait to see your next post!
Written by Steve Moore on 06.16.09
One thing I would like to add is, the results don’t seem to be correct. I searched for Adolf Hitler, but the results date back to as early as 1400’s…
Written by Varun on 06.16.09