I have been toying around with the Managing News and Tattler flavors of Drupal for a while, and recently decided to launch a couple websites to really test them out. I build the first website specifically for Drupal News and follows all the top Drupal news sources for the lastest content with Managing News. The other site I built was a site following all the latest Drupal Buzz from any source that is covering the Drupal keywords I entered using the Tattler app.

Managing News seems to do pretty well at handling feeds out of the box and aggregates the feed content onto pages specifically for those feeds. It also has a feature to create channels for specific posts which is similar to tagging normal posts on a site. One of the not so great features about Managing News is that you can quickly and easily share any content you want with friends but only to Twitter, Facebook, and Email out of the box. With the lacking in overall social sharing features, Managing News makes up with in a couple very useful features. The one I liked most was the map. The stories coming in through the feeds are somehow geocoded and put a blip on the world map from where they originated. All the stories on the site are also pulled into a stats graph which keeps track of the trends of stories being added. To top off those set of features that make Managing News a great tool for journalists, you can print turn any page into a print version quickly and easily with 1 click.

After getting the Managing News site setup. I decided to also try out a Tattler app site. Tattler is another tool used to find news stories from multiple sources, but semantically mines the content through keywords. It uses a system of "mentions" to track similar content which includes those keywords on different RSS feeds. Tattler seems to do a bit more of the legwork itself once you add some keywords to track. It uses the Calais module to semantically group the content as well. Once again, Tattler does a bit better in the sharing department by using the AddThis button module, which allows you to basically add the post to any service you can think of.

I found out through the @Tattlerapp Twitter page that there is an update to the latest Tattler software package available to download through the individual modules and the theme. I decided to try out this update and enabled the Tattler Semantics module as they suggested and the available ttlr_semantic_views block for that module in the right sidebar. It really adds some nice categorization to the content coming through by grabbing mentions and grouping them in a descending order with the most mentions at the top.

Overall, I think these 2 Drupal flavors bring a whole new meaning to "drinking the koolaide" as now Drupal's Koolaid has more than 1 flavor. These are both great tools and serve their own purpose. I wouldn't want to see either one used over the other in the wrong case. I could actually see them being useful to be used together in a community site situation. One covering news sources and the other covering the buzz around certain topics. I will have to provide some more details about what sort of situations would best be suited for each in another post. For now, try out using both Managing News and Tattler app as your next experiment, and see what your opinion is on which is the more useful app. I am going to continue to build news and buzz sites for a few of my other Drupal websites and see if I can come to a stronger conclusion the next time around.