You should see, on the right of this page, a ‘Latest College Research News’ box which collates and prints the latest blog posts from all the College of Social Science research units. It means that you, viewers of this blog, can see, at a glance, what is going on across the College in terms of research, without having to search and explore each individual site.
The tool that has helped me do this is the very clever and quite pretty Yahoo Pipes.
Pipes allows you to make a string of data from inputs (such as RSS feeds and Flickr images), filter, merge or split them and output them in a whole new RSS feed that collate your inputs. This is really useful for situations such as that described previously but also for other uses, for example, collating news items from a variety of sources on a certain topic and outputting them on a Twitter account (using something like Twitterfeed in conjunction).
The possibilities are vast and it’s even just fun moving around the boxes on your pipe and watching the curvy lines move with them!