Aggregate Blogs

I'd like to create a CS blog which is an aggregate of a group of blogs based upon categories (or some other property)

Essentially, I have a team of people all with their own blogs.  They are all in the same Group.  I would like to create a blog that rolls up some of the posts from that team, making it appear to be a team blog.  I would like to do this (if possible) by having them all use the same category.

Is that possible?

Also, is it possible to create an RSS feed of a specific category across a group or entire server?

Thanks in advance for your help.

-j

If I understand you correctly, that's something I've been thinking/yammering about-

..To have an 'parent' blog that aggregates 'children' blogs, like the default aggregate view, but is adding all the features/advantages of an actual blog.  I hope to be able to do, too, and use nav "breadcrumb/path" in blog titles, to indicate heirarchy.. like:

mySite.com / blogs / parentBlogTitle / 
                                 This Blog Title

In the interim, I'm "filtering" the aggregate view by Blog Group, set by current host/subdomain. (and eliminated that icky querystring)

 

(I just noticed the Tags textbox has an auto-complete feature.. way cool)

I'm actually looking for the same type of thing. I was hoping that the Tag Cloud functionality would do this. (haven't tried yet)

For example - let's say I start a community for car lovers. If I signed up 4 writers - 4 seperate blogs. Each of them would write about a specific brand like GM, Ford, Toyota, Honda. Each of them would have their own category - per brand.

But hey - they all love Ferrari's so they all write about Ferrari. What now?

The content is way better when it's all aggregated by the same RSS feed (at least!)
Whether it's done by "global category" or a tag or whatever...that's what I need.
Otherwise readers hit the main aggregation page and see 4 different blogs - and perhaps 4 different Ferrari articles - none of which are truely aggregated...this is painful in my view

So, I think we're asking for the same thing.... The best example of how this is done right now can be seen on a site like Deadspin. They even use the tags in the URL - so people who don't subscribe to the RSS feed can at least use a keyword/tag in the browser to get to the content...powerful stuff.

yeah, that pretty well describes what i'm after too.

that, or an option to cross-post where the content exists only once in the data store, but is presented from various blog, rss outputs

anyone got any ideas?

is this a feature request?

I think you guys are talking about "Mirrored Blogs."  If so, this is coming in CS 2.1.  A Mirrored Blog is a single blog/feed which is comprised of multiple feeds by category or tag.  (In CS 2.1, tags become categories, so same thing.)

Here's an example, Telligent Bloggers.  Its an aggregation of Telligent Staff Blogs, based on the URL of the individual bloggers' Community Server category.

I blogged about this a bit on my personal blog here.

http://dbvt.com/blog/archive/2006/05/21/4606.aspx

yup. that's the stuff.

 and the waiting begins. i do hope it ships this month...

 

 

-j