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March 31, 2008

Following a writer

Is there a (nice) way to follow a writer's work as it gets published across various news sources?

I ask because I was listening to a Fora.TV broadcast of an interview with Fred Kaufman (mostly about his new book, "A Short History of the American Stomach" - mp3)...and, in short, I found him to be an interesting and witty personality, and I would be interested in reading more of his work.

His bio states that he "has written about American food culture and other subjects for Harper's
Magazine, the New Yorker, Gourmet, Gastronomica, and the New York Times
Magazine, among others."

I'd love to be able to create some sort of feed that alerts me to a new Fred Kaufman article...regardless of where it was published...but i'm not sure how I could do that. My best guess as to how I could do that currently would be to:

• Create a feed based on some search criteria...probably the writer's name. I could create a google news alert, but this would probably flood the feed with news about a book or other engagements, other people with the same name...lots of junk. Seems too broad.
• Subscribe to updates from every news sources (for instance, the New Yorker, Gourmet, The NYTimes Magazine...etc) where the writer may be published. Again, I'd get a lot of things I may not be interested in...and probably even miss outlets that I'm not familiar with.
• Get lucky that the writer i'd like to follow has a blog (like Malcolm Gladwell). If he/she doesn't...alas.

I guess what i'd love would be some sort of "authored by" tag (or some such) that I can aggregate (especially since most outlets are now embracing a "mostly online, mostly accessible" model). It probably already exists (microformats?)...but not in a manner I am immediately aware of.

Clampants | March 31, 2008 01:41 PM