Library clips

Follow up on an earlier post .

Working on a way to deliver industry news to my clients in a no fuss way.

The easiest way is to use Google news customised and create 10 or so topic tabs, this is an amazing but simple tool…but then this is news from just one source.

Another option is to use RSS to JAVA or PHP and have a web page with about 10 topic boxes…this way I can include news from multiple sources ie. I could mix RSS feeds from Yahoo! News, Google News, Topix, and PubSub, etc…via Blogdigger Groups or RSS mix
or Feedjumbler or Feedmarker into one re-mixed feed (do this 10 times, one for each topic).

The 3rd option is to make 10 Superblogs or 10 Blogdigger Groups with about 5 or so feeds in each group…or even a public Bloglines account.

These 3 options are all the easiest (automated), but are only has good as my search terms, there may be a lot of noise in the results.

A more precise but time consuming approach is to bookmark all the news items in Furl (even categorise them), but this isn’t visually effective for my needs…so I could use RSS to HTML (or JAVA or PHP) to re-syndicate the content to a blog. (to find past content you could use the blog, but you can’t browse by category, you’d have to go to Furl to search by category)

To augment this it would be good to be able to clip to Furl from within Bloglines or Newsgator (maybe I could use a RSS reader/bookmark managers like Pluck or Feedmarker, as I could clip to a folder which has its own RSS feed)…in this way I don’t need to use Furl (but I do like Furl’s public searchable archive).

Last choice is to manually blog each entry via a Blog this! Bookmarklet or even use reBlog to re-publish the whole content.

In the end, the most visually effective for my purposes is to use Google news customised or re-syndicate 10 boxes of news on the one web page.
A major point about this process is that it works by itself (I only need to set it up)…the downside is there will be some noise and it will lack a personal archive.

The 3rd option is less effective in presentation but at least you have an archive…another disadvantage is that you now have 10 blogs for news instead of all the news on one page.

The last options are ideal as you can; format a blog’s presentation to your clients needs, the results are precise, and you have a searchable archive…the major obstacle is that you have to manually post to this blog one way or another daily (so it really is a different scenario in this respect).

At the end of my post on Connotea I mentioned an “Alternate View” by date.

Here is the excerpt:

“You can view all public bookmarks sorted by date…ie. using the date as a section title, like a blog
o At the moment you have to click on a date (which is noted on the end of every bookmark)…wouldn’t it be good if there was a calendar archive (like on a blog) to view entries made on any date

o I’d like to view this at the user level
(see dashLog)”

Furl only lets you sort by date (newest to oldest and vice versa).
del.icio.us is text only.
citeULike is text only
Del.irio.us is text only
- when you click on expand, each bookmark marks the date as a heading above the bookmark title (this is no different from the others really as the date has just been shifted from the end of a bookmark-as a little note-to the top of the bookmark-as a large heading.

So this is a unique aspect to Connotea…now as I mentioned above this would be more usable if there was a calendar archive to click on.

But even more useful would be to see this at the user level.

This is when the unique but simple features of dashLog shine…it simply has a date heading for all items bookmarked within that date…also see an earlier post.
(this is a common feature in many blogs, but it seems more prominent in dashLog)

The only thing missing is a date archive, and categories/tags (coming soon) with RSS feeds I hope.

When these features are added this will be a link blog that has both the characteristics of a blog and a bookmark manager…a lot of this has to do with presentation, I think most bookmark managers have these features, if only they would be presented in this fashion.

I feel Connotea or any other bookmark manager could have an alternate view by date that assimilates the presentation of dashLog…this could be viewed at the public level, the public tag level, the user level, and the user tag level.