Library clips

Gataga - Social bookmark search and exploration engine is a meta-search tool for social bookmark managers.

For every search an RSS feed is generated, as Library Stuff pointed out, now I don’t have to subscribe to numerous RSS feeds anymore (one for each service) - although you could make a re-mix feed.

There are many popular social bookmark managers on the web (all with a great sharing community base), Gataga leverages all these services and lets you search across them all in one go…how’s that for discovery!

Of course this is a different search tool to many other meta-search engines as it is not searching everything on the web, it is only searching a portion of the web.
The portion of the web it searches can be referred to the human-indexed web (pages saved by people who use the various social bookmark services indexed by Gataga).

In this respect you can search a cleaner version of the web, websites that matter, of course though there is no comparison to the recall of traditional web engines, but the precision is competitive in it’s own style.

On the web precision is achieved using phrase, boolean searching, on Gataga precision is more effortless as you are searching in a subject field by default…so the precision is half way there before you even search as the webpage has been tagged with an aboutness label
…you can also add tags together.

I guess you could say it is a subject field search engine, something the web tried to be to start with, but now the users are defining the subject…hooray!

Furl (need an account) and Zniff (search engine for Spurl) both search their systems, but they are not subject searching, they are full-text searching a proprietary portion of the human-indexed web.

So I gather they are ranking results similar to Google, as well as utilising tags (usually subject descriptors) as a major player in ranking results.

Now I’m not sure if Gataga is searching for tags or within tags.
ie. Enter a search term and it shows you a list of results that have that tag

…or does it also search in the title field, comments field, any other fields, or even full-text (only for services that cache, like Furl and Spurl), so a result may in-fact not even have the search term as a tag.

A search query in Furl may produce a hit that doesn’t neccessarily have that term as a tag, but the term may be in the title or full-text, and was considered relevant.

I also noticed that they have a link near the search box called “search by tag”…maybe this means you are only searching in the tag field (similar to subject searching)

…and the main search may be searching in numerous fields.

I wonder how results are ranked in both these search options.

How do you rank the “search by tag”, it must just show the latest bookmark with that tag first, and so on…as all bookmarks with a particular tag will have exactly equal relevance.

An interesting measure would be to search with boolean in different fields.

Eg. blog (tag field) AND library (all fields)

blog (tag field) AND library (title field)

I wonder what the quality of these two searches would be compared to a search you can already perform in Gataga…I think.
Eg. blog AND library (tag field)

Other similar meta-tag search services:

Tag Central
Searches for tags and returns a list of results of items with that tag.
Results are shown by service and not blended, not sure how they are sorted.

Technorati Tags
Results include blog categories, but the web page also lists results from a few bookmark managers…this again searches for tags and returns a list of results of items with that tag.

Much of this has been covered in an earlier post.

Rojolicious; closing the loop between Rojo and del.icio.us…as it sounds, bookmark items from your RSS reader into your bookmark manager.
That is, from Rojo to del.icio.us…cool stuff! (requires Firefox)

People are starting to (DIY) customise the way they interact with the many tools they use for storage, reading, sharing, etc…in order to make things smoother, convenient and automated.

Many tools, offer a whole Personal Information Management package, but some of us prefer to use separate tools.

Major players, such as Bloglines, are hopeully sitting quietly in the wings, to only surprise us with a host of new customised features that are sorely needed by its users.

Gee, the blogoshere allows great customer feedback!

Following on from More than one way to curate a blog!

Examining the blogging/RSS tools I’m yet to find a platform where I can make my own RSS aggregator, ie. using tools for the average non-techie.

Is there a way to make a blog act like an aggregator?

Currently with blogs, if you have a list of links (blogroll) in the sidebar, they will link to the native site; you can’t view the content within the blog, because the content hasn’t been published within the blog.

What you can do is re-syndicate a feed into a blog (RSS to HTML).

You can even blend feeds (multiple feeds into one) and re-syndicate that into a blog.

Problem is that you can’t re-syndicate multiple feeds simultaneously into your blog and have the content from each feed in a category.

If you could do this, then you would be able to click on a category and view the contents just from one of the re-syndicated feeds.
This would be similar to an RSS aggregator, as clicking on a category would be similar to clicking on a feed in your aggregator.

The only conclusion I reached was using a multi-platform blog, see RSS: transport topics.

This being, every RSS feed is re-syndicated into its own blog, so if you have 10 single feeds (re-mixed or native, it doesn’t matter), you will have 10 blogs.

Then aggregate all the blogs into a master blog, and each blog will be a category in the master blog.

So when you click on a category it will still go to the native site, but it is within the website of the multi-blog portal, so the look and feel will be smooth as the presentation of the blogs will be similar.

Problem is you still have to press the back arrow on your toolbar to go back to the master blog.

So to this extent it still doesn’t act like an aggregator, as when you click on a category the whole web page launches into a new page, unlike an aggregator where your list of feeds live in a static pane.

An example of using a master blog is Georgia State University – Library News & Subject Blogs.

This is the master (aggregated) blog, the individual blogs that populate the master blog are listed on the right, and you will see that the entries in the master blog are assigned to categories, which are actually the individual blogs.

For this example the content in these individual blogs have been published manually within the blog.
For our example, there is a slight difference as we are not publishing anything ourselves, but instead re-syndicating what has already been published. This actually makes no difference to the mechanics of this process.

So if we attempted aggregating all our blogs into a master blog, we would have our main RSS feed (master blog) plus an RSS feed for each category (this is the feed for each blog, which is in fact a clone feed of the feed/s that is originally being re-syndicated).

So you could read the contents of the master blog in your RSS reader or the old fashion way, from the master blog website itself.

A professional example of a public RSS aggregator is Newstation.

Unlike our example, the categories are kept in a static pane or frame on the left of the page, when you click on a category just the right frame changes content.

So this acts just like a typical RSS aggregator, only it is public.

The extra benefit of this site is that categories are kept in folders…this will only work in our homemade example if the master blog has sub-categories implemented.

But creating a system such as Newstation or even LIS feeds requires some expertise and additional software.
We require a system that is easy enough to use as blogs…a system that allows anyone to make their own public RSS aggregator.

Two similar tools on the market that are close to this reality are Bloglines (public) and Blogdigger Groups …the major obstacle in achieving our goal is the customisation and presentation.

Some requirements for these two services

Blogdigger Groups

• Labels/names for feeds
• Folders for feeds

Bloglines (public)

• General RSS feed
• Search all feeds (plus a search RSS feed)

Both

• Customise interface (make your own presentation, as you can with blogs)
• Folder RSS feed
• Browse/Search in one feed (generating a search RSS feed)
• Browse/Search in a selection of feeds (generating a search RSS feed)
• Browse/Search in a folder/s (generating a search RSS feed)
• Save, print, email, comment, IM, blog, discuss, etc…under each entry