News Aggregator Website

I need a news aggregator website developed. This site will gather content within a specific topic and display it on the site appropriately based on popularity within the Internet news/blog - sphere. This site is similar in concept to [login to view URL], but in a different industry. News will come from: - Mainstream online news sources (local and national papers, online magazines, etc.) - Blogs - this will be the main source for content Features needed: - RSS syndication for readers - for SEO purposes, the homepage would create a cache for search engines to index (see how they did it here: [login to view URL]:techmeme.com&num=100&hl=en&hs=Jh7&lr=&safe=off&client=firefox&rls=[login to view URL]:en-US:official&start=0&sa=N) I am honestly not sure how this would work best - would this type of aggregator site use a bot? Or analyze RSS feeds? I really want to automate the process of collecting news (though I am sure there will be some hand-editing involved), but also take into account other factors to determine what's important: - How many other people have written about this event? (More people, more important.) - How many comments are these posts getting? (More comments, more important._ Etc... Ideally, a bot (perhaps that isn't the right term) would head out into cyberspace and literally scan the thousands of blogs that may mention this specific niche (I can supply a list of keywords that would flag that we want that content) and pull that content in to display on the site. I need a way to monitor hundreds of news sources at one time, but I am not sure how that would work (hence the project). I have a long list of news sources for content, but I want to make SURE that I would grab any content written anywhere that is indexed about this topic even if it isn't a source most people monitor for this topic - ie. mainstream media. PAGE LAYOUT: I want the layout somewhat like Techmeme (with the title, snippet, related content,etc.) I need a sidebar where I can add adverts etc. Could be an HTML page, ifram or include file.