Library clips

Mentioned in an earlier post about Yahoo! Tag Soup, a computer generated list of tags for Yahoo! News presented in a tag cloud.

Well now you can make a tag cloud for any RSS feed/s, via TagCloud…and then paste the code into your blog.

These are considered “hot keywords”, meaning they are based on frequency…I think.

From their website:

“…TagCloud searches any number of RSS feed you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds…”

Find information in your blog:

• Search box
• Surf around
• Browse archives
• Browse categories
• Browse tags (subject terms) for your blog
  (this applies if you duplicate your blog content with a Social Bookmark Manager, using tags as subject terms, whereas the blog categories are more broad)
• Computer processed tags, via TagCloud
  (These are tag names derived by a computer process that extracts a cloud of frequent/popular keywords - neither author or user-defined)

Here is my tag cloud for this blog.

I also pasted the code into my template…tried to fit it in the sidebar, so I added height and width to the code…although it looks a bit messy.

This is my code:

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"width="160" height="2500"src="http://www.tagcloud.com/cloud/js/LC-TagCloud/default"</script>

…any suggestions on making this more neat.

Here is a TagCloud for my del.icio.us account.

It would be great if del.icio.us made code for a tag cloud.
The difference is this would be a definitive tag cloud for user-defined tags, not popular/recent keyword extracted tags.

[via SEWblog]

I knew that moreover had a list of category feeds, what I didn’t know is that you can make your own RSS search feeds…you can even save a list of the feeds you have made.

Make your own news here.

FeedDirect is a tool that will re-syndicate the feed from RSS to Java.

On an earlier post I was lamenting the fact that I didn’t know which news aggregator to rely on (must allow RSS search feeds), so I use Topix.net, Yahoo! News, and Google News…now I have moreover to add to the mix.

I really need to do the same search feed on all these 4 news aggregators and see the differences, because reading all of them has way too much duplication, but there are the unique stories that pop up.

Can any news librarians shed any light…as I don’t know where each of these news aggregators are sourcing the news from themselves.

I believe moreover results are already covered in Yahoo! News via this press release…so maybe I can just rely on Yahoo! News to read news gathered by moreover.

Also noticed that you can limit Yahoo! News to “All Web” or “Yahoo! News Only” (syntax becomes source: Yahoo)…so if you search “Yahoo! News Only” this must not include the results from moreover.

Even if they do source news from the same source the results will be different, because it’s the news they choose to show in the search results according to the mechanics of the individual search engine…so the same content is in there somewhere, it’s just how it is extracted and sorted that will show different results.

Speakwire allows you to listen to an RSS feed from the selection on offer or type in the URL of your favourite feed.

Their website notes that the feed URL must end in .rss or .xml…damn mine ends in /feed…doesn’t work for Feedburner feeds either.

…an earlier blog post referred to audio feeds (4th paragraph).

From their website:

“Autocasting” is an automated form of podcasting that allows bloggers and blog readers to generate audio versions of text blogs from RSS feeds. Autocasting software uses XML parsers, TTS (text-to-speech) engines, and audio conversion utilities to convert text blogs into audio files that can be placed on a blog for download, synchronized to a portable audio device, or played on a desktop computer…”

…more on their help page.

As I understand you can select several of their suggested feeds and collect these in a box…if you click “Remember my feeds” your favourite feeds will always be in this box waiting to be listened.

If it does work for your blog, I wonder if their could be a way to put an audio version feed of your blog as a link on your blog sidebar…this way people could read or listen to your feed.

…or even a link on your blog that goes to Speakwire to listen to your blog.

They do say, “…you can then make a blogcast and link back to our site to let others hear it”.

…early days yet!

Is this someone Bloglines could partner with…so you have a choice to read your feeds or listen to your feeds in your favourite RSS reader…listening to feeds on your mobile phone RSS reader makes sense.

[via SearchEngineWatchBlog]

Just noticed that the NewzCrawler RSS Reader not only reads feeds but also Usenet Newsgroups and the Web.

The other interesting features is that it has a comments bookmarklet (via Comments API) to make comments on posts from your RSS reader…it also has a WYSIWYG editor to make posts from your RSS reader client to your blog.

Write posts offline, without opening your browser, then hit publish and it will send the post to your blog…other advantage is the WYSIWYG features are more expansive on these dedicated editing clients.

Some offline blogging editors:

qumana (5 days to go)

w.bloggar

BlogJet

Zoundry