Hello crafty developers,

I have aggregated RSS feeds from various sources with RSSowl, fetching directly from the social mention API. The RSS feeds are categorized into the following major categories: blogs, news, twitter, Q&A and social networking sites. Each major category is nested with a common group of RSS feeds that represent a particular client/brand ontology. Merging these feeds into the RSSowl reader application, allows me to conduct and save refined search queries (from the aggregated data) into a single file - that I can then tag and further segment for analysis.

This scheme is utilized for my own research needs and has helped me considerably. However, I find this RSS mashup scheme kinda clumsy, it requires quite a bit of time to initially organize all of the feeds and I would like to be able to do further natural language processing to the data as well as eventually be able to rank the collected list of URL's into some order of media prominence - right I don't want to pay the ridiculous radian6 web analytics fees, when my intuition is telling me that with a bit of 'elbow grease' I can maybe leverage some available resources online to develop a functional low scale web mining application and get some good intelligence from it. I am now starting to learn a little about computer science - my background is in physical science/statistics so is my thinking in the right track?

So, I guess I am imagining an application that allows me to query in a refined manner. A manner that allows me to search for keyword combinations, applying AND/OR operators, selectively focus my queries into particular sources - like a collection of blogs or twitter, or social networking communities, then save the results of my queries into a structured format that can then be manipulated and explored. Am I dreaming?

I just had to get all of this out. any bit of advice and insight would be hugely appreciated.

my best, Mark