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June 29, 2005

ReBlg: blog this!

Filed under: blogs, tools

ReBlg not to be confused with reBlog (one-click re-posting [with an automated reference - to avoid copyright issues] from you RSS reader to your blog), is a new tool in development that claims to be a universal Blog This! button.

From their post:

“Tired of being forced to use only the latest tool or utility to take advantage of a new standard – wish you could use ANY tool or utility instead?” - where’s a routing service to enable me to send posts to whatever tool I chose?….

“So how would a standard to enable a universal “Blog This” button to work? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to click on a ‘ReBlg’ button and decide which tool I want to send that post to – irregardless of who produces that tool? Wouldn’t it be nice that this process NOT lose the structure of the microformat or micro-content I’m clicking on – thereby keeping in tact the structure of that post?”

“Wouldn’t it be nice to support a system of meshing together various kinds of tools, utilities or solutions – from a wide range of vendor’s – without forcing end-users to take sides or lock them into one tool vendors camp or product?”

“ReBlg.com would enable end-users to register their favorite tool of choice so that wherever they traveled on the web, by simply clicking on the ‘ReBlg’ button – they could easily send that post to their favorite tool. If the end-user doesn’t want to rely upon our web service, then they can simply download a MIME handler to do that routing for them.”

This is what I’ve been looking around for, I wonder if it would work like the print button, or discuss button on the IE browser

…where exactly does this button sit, maybe I should ask the people at Reblg.

I wonder how it would handle frames, that is, if you want to send an entry from your RSS reader to somewhere…when you hit the button how will it know which entry from the many in your RSS reader you want to send.
(that’s why I find right-click action very useful)

Some previous posts on this functionality:

Connecting my Blog, Aggregator, and Bookmarks
Blog post utilities!
Tagophilia for every blog entry

Enterprise folksonomy

Filed under: General, tags, folksonomy

This is a shout out to all!

I’m wanting to find out if there are any enterprise folksonomy packages…all the social bookmark managers I’ve used are web-based.

Basically we want a social bookmark manager installed on our server and restricted to our staff…also something we can customise to suit our Intranet.

I’m aware a few bookmark managers allow you to create groups, and I know we can make Furl private and everyone can share the log-in, but we want to customise (put a our logo) and have the security (even though I know Furl will always be around) by installing it on our server.

Even better, is there a system where everyone has their own account, contributing to the folksonomy (homepage), but the contributors are only the staff at our company?

Instead of being for the whole web contributing to the folksonomy, it is just restricted to our staff.

I would test it out on just one business unit, if it worked fine, then we could maybe make groups within the folksonomy, for all the business units.

In comparison

Web

  • Contributors - anyone with an account
  • Groups - anyone with an account that is in a group

Enterprise

  • Contributors - restricted to staff
  • Groups - business units

So the master home page would have the aggregated folksonomy of all the business units (groups)

The business units (groups) would have their own home page (folksonomy)

Also able to browse tag clouds by group or all groups together in one giant cloud…as well as browse a tag set.

Search

  • full-text
  • title field
  • tag field
  • within a group
  • within whole folksonomy

Even better would be to enable bookmarking of other file types, such as doc, xls, pdf, etc..

Once the system is up and running, I will see how the tags pan out (educating people on tag ettiquette…and moderating the tags by fixing mistakes, plurals, synonyms, acronyms…then re-educating people about these moderations, eg. please use New York and not NY)

…maybe we could make the system smart, so if someone types in NY a prompt will come up saying please use New York (this would be kind of like a synonym ring or rule set)

Now that takes care of appropriate tags when bookmarking, what about when browsing.

Well if someone types in NY, the result should be empty, but there should be a note that reads, please use New York.

After a while we can see how well the emerging vocabulary evolves, and if we need to turn it into some sort of hybrid system where some tags are not allowed (please choose another tag from this list or suggest a tag to the administrator)…and if namespaces or a a type of taxonomy is required.

The following comments on this post are very insightful.

Here is an excerpt of one comment:

“…I predict that these concepts will continue to grow in popularity because people want to organize information. However, they will paint themselves into a corner and the only way out is through the transformation of tagging schemes into ontologies. Don’t get me wrong - I think these early tagging systems are useful because they will educate us to the requirements beyond the near horizon and just how low the ceiling is for emergent (taxonomy-based) tagging.

As such, I predict that from a broad and divergent set of terms will emerge groups that create ontological overlays (see XTM 1.0) of agreed-open definitions. I suspect these groups will form around a domain of expertise and a desire to eliminate chaos created by ground-up taxonomies. This scenario requires the availability of tagging API’s that allow a higher-order architecture to emerge.”

Also this post speculates on the processes.

An excerpt from the post:

“…could tag new and existing content in an unrestricted manner for a set period of time. At the cut-off point, the tags would be analysed for popularity and similarity (synonyms, misspellings etc.), and a reduced set then used for an open (card) sort. The results of this could be analysed and transferred into a first iteration of a taxonomy, along set rules.
The taxonomy could then be exposed to the search engine and CMS - authors would now tag their content using the taxonomy, and, for ongoing maintenance would still have the option for creating a new tag. New tags could be processed by the taxonmomist and added/amended to the overall classification as necessary. I’m not sure whether this would work in practice, but it might be the outline of using rapid, distributed categorisation to move to a stable classification, and it would certainly reflect a consensus opinion…”

Now if there was a system I could start trialing!

Take 3: Findory RSS related articles

Filed under: General, blogs, rss

Third time lucky, this post is clarifying some points on two earlier posts:

Subscribe to a blog via the RSS engines??
Findory version of your blog

Greg Linden from Findory pointed out in a comment, that even though Findory does have a page to read the latest posts from your blog, the feed that is generated is not a feed for your blog but instead a feed for related articles to your blog.

This is the only RSS engine, as far as I know, that generates an RSS feed for related articles…very unique!

At the bottom of the page next to the RSS feed, they have an icon called “NEWS INLINE”…this is basically a javascript box to put on your blog sidebar to show related articles.

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