Speaking of useful web services and Slack, here’s something I’m now using to make my own news-gathering filters available to others via Slack. NewsBlur, my RSS service of choice (I’ll write about it eventually, I promise), has launched support for RSS feeds of entire folders:

These folders keep track of sites you add and remove from them. They also allow you to filter out stories you don’t want to read or even choose to only show the stories you have in focus.

All of your feed subscriptions in the folder, including subfolders, are merged into a single river of news in RSS format. Technically we use Atom 1.0 format for NewsBlur’s many RSS feeds, but I’m not choosing a side here.

This wouldn’t normally be exciting for most RSS people like me, except that NewsBlur lets you train the service to promote stories you like and hide others you don’t want to see, and now you can output a stream of important stories-only via RSS.

For us, this means that the filters I’ve been building for news I care about can be useful to others so that a) they don’t have to subscribe to dozens of blogs themselves and cull their headlines over time and b) they can receive highlights with rich previews in a Slack channel. Great implementation by NewsBlur, and a perfect fit for how we’re using Slack.