I am tracking on around 2500 companies who are doing interesting things in the API space. Out of these companies about 1000 of them have blogs, which for me is a pretty important signal. About 1/4 of these companies with blogs, do not have an RSS feed, which in 2014 seems a little odd to me, but maybe I'm an old timer.
I believe that a blog is one of the most important signals, any API provider come put out, right alongside Twitter and Github. Historically I depend on the Twitter account for these RSS-less blogs, but now I'm taking a different path, and using Kimono Labs to fill in the gap.
Using the Kimono Labs Chrome extension, I just visit the main blog page for one of these companies, and select the title of the first blog post. Kimono gives me the ability to name this field, which I usually just call “title”. Since the title is a link, Kimono also associates the link to the blog post, along with each title. You could also highlight the summary text, but I don’t need this, as I have secondary processes that runs and pulls the full content of a blog post, as well as the timestamp, author, and taking of a screenshot.
Within a couple of seconds, using Kimono Labs, I now have an API for each companies blog, assuming the role RSS would normally play. When I have time each week, I will generate an API for the most important companies I'm tracking on. Maybe someday I will close the entire blog syndication gap for the companies I track on, but for now its nice to be able to tackle the most high value companies, and know that I have a viable solution to the problem with Kimono Labs.
