Library clips

Gigablast is offering some unique features:

Gigablast Custom Topic Search

Create your own topic search engine (include up to 200 web-sites), include the code to put a search box on your web-site or blog.

Furl can also act as your own mini-search engine (along with being a social bookmark manager), but it is limited to searching full-text of web-pages not web-sites (which consist of many pages)…this is what makes this Gigablast offering so powerful. This system goes one step further than Google Personalized and gives you the power, letting you customise your own search engine, true personalisation!

What a great application for business, you could include 200 web-sites of your competitors to gather intelligence or web-sites of work related topics to help relieve employees of information overload…if there are fewer sites in the search pot employees won’t spend as much time reading irrelevant hits.

Of course this is good as a first base, if you then can’t find your needed information search the web at large. The same example applies to libraries and schools, a teacher can make a mini-search engine for their class topic, a librarian can make a subject guide search engine…or even many search engines within a subject guide, eg. one for associations, one for journals, one for government information, etc..

Gigablast Site Search

Similar to Google, but claimed better, is Gigablast’s site search, including code for a search box.

Great post at Fred On Something… about the Omea RSS reader

Has anyone used reBlog, it seems like a really cool RSS reader and blog publisher plug-in to use for those who clip rather than write their own blog posts.

From their website:

This sounds similar to reading feeds in Bloglines and then just clipping relevant posts to the Bloglines clip blog…although reBlog enables you to clip in this fashion using any type of blog software (well 4 or 5 at the moment)…this is a great idea as it is versatile and the Bloglines clip blog isn’t a robust enough blog at the moment.

Clip blogs can also be fashioned by using a bookmarking service, RSS-to-HTML, and a blog. CCTE distributed research blog gets it’s content by bookmarking posts in del.icio.us (adding comments in the extended field), then using RSS Digest, these bookmarks are transfered to automatically populate the blog.

Here is an example of a blog post using reBlog:

Cell Phones Put to Novel Use

Forget conversations and even e-mail. Japanese gadget freaks get literary with their mobile phones, reading everything from sex manuals to full-length classics on the devices, a few lines at a time.

Originally from Wired News, ReBlogged by Gavin on March 20, 2005 | edit

Burning bird has induced a great discussion from one of her posts on tagback.

Trackback is a system where you can tell someone (pinging them) you are including a link to one of their posts in your own post. You can also use it as a referrer, just simply pinging them to say I linked to you because this seems relevant.

Now because of the increased spamming occuring the trackback system is starting to be less useful as a referrer system, although I still find it useful. (This would be moreso on popular blogs as spammers get more visibility)

The suggested replacement (using Technorati tags) is called Tagback. For example at the end of this post I could state a tag called http://technorati.com/tag/jttagsfortrackbacks.

…then people can use this "Technorati tag link" in their post (as a new form of trackback) which will be pinged and appear in the Technorati tag. I can look up this tag daily to see the latest…Technorati tags don’t have RSS feeds yet!

NOTE: It seems you don’t have to ping like trackback, you only have to include the link in your post and as usual Technorati will pick it up.

Good idea as anything used with this tag (via other systems such as del.icio.us, Furl, Flickr) is picked up by Technorati…so there is a place where some discussion around this post is stored and available for public viewing. Before hand you would go to the actual blog post to see the trackbacks or go to Technorati and do a (link) blog post search to view who is talking about that post. Now you go to a "blog post specific Technorati tag" to view this information plus anything else that has been included in this tag (so it extends beyond just including trackbacks)…although you still commonly go to the actual blog post to view discussion in the comments.

The issues against this system (from the comments):

Improper use of tags, as the folksonomy system is a balance between personal and public use and ultimately trying to create an emerging vocabularly…using tags to represent blog posts is littering the folksonomy.

Why this system, when we have Topic Exchange?(although I find a lot of spam at Topic Exchange)…I guess the difference is that the tagback topic is for individual posts not just a broad topic…and that the use of these tags are extensible (not just limited to blog posts, and not limited to pinging). That is, if you see something similar to what I’m taking about in this post you could bookmark it in Furl or del.icio.us or Flickr with the tag jttagsfortrackbacks.

…although in Burningbird’s next post she used the same tagback tag as her previous one, mentioning that not every post has to have a tagback tag and the some tags can be re-used.

The jt prefix in the tagback are my initials acting as a unique identifier (along with the title)…many of the comments in Burningbird’s post feel that initials and title aren’t unique enough, and their is nothing more unique than the posts permalink.

We are relying on a third party being Technorati (also del.icio.us, Furl, and Flickr to some extent)…if these systems cease to exist one day (heaven forbid) then the content is lost…we need a sure system.

Also mentioned is that the proposed system will be more free of spam if Technorati rejects Google bots, in this way if there is no page rank spammers will be less inclined to do their dirty work