Library clips

Feedtagger is an RSS aggregator that is similar to Feedmarker in that the folders feeds are kept in are actual shareable tags themselves…so they are like topic tags if you like.

Similar to Feedmarker, all the community tags (folders you keep your RSS feeds in) are visible on the front page for all to see.

Only thing is that you can only subscribe to a topic tag within Feedtagger (as far as I can see it doesn’t expose it’s RSS feed so you can subscribe to it in another RSS Reader…this is not the case with Feedmarker).

When is Bloglines going to make their folders into sharable tags (that have RSS feeds) and present them on a hompepage to search and discover them.

In essence we are seeing these new RSS aggregators form community directories of RSS feeds…what a great idea!
Everyone is keeping their feeds in folders, so why not make these folders public by putting them into a user-named directory or list.

Another example of folksonomies..augmenting or leveraging the organization of information that is already there, just need to list them together and it forms it’s own directory (according to what users think).

Thought I’d have a play around with del.icio.us tag bundles.

They are basically just title headings to help organise your tags…so it’s an alternative to an alphabetical list…also tags can be kept under multiple headings.

A good future development would be to make these bundle headings tags themselves (also with an RSS feed)…this way we could subscibe to topic tags or bundle tags as they would be called.

So at the moment tag bundles are for personally organising your tags into groups…good also to view other people’s accounts as their is now some context.

Here are my bundles.

Another view for your tag list is a tag cloud (weighted list).
See my tag bundles in the tag cloud view, just enter the word “new” in the URL, eg. http://del.icio.us/new/johnt

del.icio.us now have a blog! (thank’s Library Stuff)

Yahoo! News also have a tag cloud page, see Yahoo! News Tag Soup as a browsing alternative to searching.

Although this isn’t a folksonomy (user-driven tags), the tags are formulated by a computer analysis of keywords in the page, see Content Analysis Web Service.

Also found another version of popular tags on del.icio.us, or it’s clones trendalicious! or populicio.us (removes duplicates), but includes descriptions (rather than just titles)

Here is the blog post with the RSS or HTML page of a descriptious version of all of the 3 above.

Don’t know if this is old news…I noticed Proquest has subject/topic based feeds, check ‘em out.

Here is the RSS feed for Information Management

Scouting around E-LIS and found a great article, Lewandowski, Dirk (2004) Date restricted queries in web search engines.

Seems search engines have problems with defining the date, and updated content on a page, making date restricted searches not really effective at all. Sometimes the content may have an updated date that refers to other updates on the webpage other than content, eg. layout.

These are 2 notions here:

• defining the date of a document
• defining an update of contents in a document

4 methods:

• server date (updates file, not specifically contents)
• first indexed/crawl (documents may be older than search engine itself, this ignores any sort of update)
• date metadata (ignored by most search engines)
• explicitly labelled in the content (not specific to content)

It turns out most search engines use the server date or date the document was first crawled.

Read the report for the analysis and results.

Also see It’s Tough to Get a Good Date with a Search Engine

Another way of checking a date of the website you are on is from Phil Bradley’s - Utilities to help search the Internet the easy way.

From the website:

“Here’s a neat little trick to use in order to find out when a page was last updated. Go to the page that you’re interested in and then, in the Address bar, type the following: javascript:alert(document.lastModified) and that’ll pop up a little window which tells you.”

But as it says, this is “last modified”, this does not specifically refer to the content.

I wonder if RSS can help at all!

(I suppose if every document on the web was in XML, we could define if the modification/update was in the content or presentation or structure…don’t know if this is correct, this is my assumption).

Also check out the references in the E-LIS page, each citation has a “SEEK” button, which launches Paracite (a citation finder)

See the about page to see it’s appropriate copy method.