"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is." - Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut
In theory, the project to place RSS news feeds on a map could be very easy.
GeoRSS is standard for encoding geographic locations in RSS feeds. RSS feeds that have this encoding are the perfect data source for this project. But, in practice, the feeds I've been looking at do not have GeoRSS information. So, I'm going to start by seeing what I can get done without GeoRSS.