Library clips

Blogbridge is getting some coverage, so I thought I’d have a look at the features…as you know I use Bloglines, so I’ll only delve into things that it offers that Bloglines lacks.

First of all it’s different as it is installed, but has a unique synching feature (check out the product tour)

Recommendations are similar to Bloglines, but you are also recommended feeds based on keywords.

Like Rojo and Feedmarker you can tag your feeds to share with others…although Feedmarker seems to be the only RSS reader to date where your tagged folder (or category or guide) has an RSS feed…actually the Newsgator Online clippings folders also has an RSS feed, but this is different as we are talking about native feeds and not items we save (the Feedmarker clip folders also have RSS feeds).

In saying this, the difference is you have the choice to subscribing to all feeds in the folder in one main feed, or as usual pick the feeds you like from the folder.
An RSS feed for a folder/guide enables you to make a Topic RSS feed (made up of feeds from relevant blogs, and maybe even search feeds from the news, web, blogosphere, or tagosphere)

At the moment BlogBridge has an expert section where people can contribute a list of feeds relevant to a topic, but it lacks one feed for the whole topic (at the folder level).
Bloglines, has it’s public version, but it too doesn’t have RSS feeds at the folder level either.

Robin Good mentions that BlogBridge is the closest RSS reader to set up RSS Radars…any expert can set up radars, but doing it all from within the RSS reader is a new conception (great for novices who don’t know about the plethora of RSS engines out there and processes involved).

The RSS Radars in BlogBridge are referred to as SmartFeeds (these are basically generating search RSS feeds)
…maybe an RSS Radar is a collection of SmartFeeds, or a collection of a combination of SmartFeeds and native feeds.

Bloglines allows you to subscribe to a search feed in its blog engine, and also within your subscriptions.

Newsgator Online does the same thing, but not within your subscription (don’t know what engine they use, maybe it’s there own collection of data)

SharpReader does the samething, but uses Feedster.

The great thing about BlogBridge is that they offer multiple engines to choose from to generate your SmartFeeds, that is, you don’t have to leave BlogBridge to generate your SmartFeeds from non-inbuilt engines.

So, from a drop-down menu you can generate a search RSS feed (SmartFeed) from: your own subscriptions, del.icio.us, feedster, findory related, flickr, Technorati tags…these are the only choices I can see from their blog post.
Some other inclusions would be good, or maybe you could include your own, such as web (MSN, Google Alert, IceRocket), News (MSN news, Yahoo! News, Google News, Topix.net), and other social bookmark managers (maybe even Gataga)…see more.

It seems that FeedDemon also has this feature (this is a fee-based RSS Reader).

This type of usability enables the ultimate personalization and customization required by a Newsmaster all from the one tool, this could become a powerful Newsmastering agent.

If the user is aware of the many RSS engines then it can be handy to make SmartFeeds from the native engine, as you can trial and error to see what results you get before you commit to subscribing…I suppose once you have worked out your search query, you could go back to BlogBridge and subscribe the SmartFeed way.

There is also an added option to limit the SmartFeeds to only unread items in your subscriptions, date, rating, etc
This is good as a sorting function to read articles grouped in a different way, but why would you want to subscribe to articles with some of these limits.

Sorting function

Bloglines only sorts on the per-feed level by a time function, at the folder level you can sort by date (newest/oldest), unread, or A-Z.

SharpReader lets you sort also by time, unread items, flagged items, and highlights text. (this is all available even on a per-feed basis)

Rojo has a unique feature where you can search in one feed (it would be good if you could search in a selection of feeds) although it doesn’t generate an RSS feed…it also sorts by frequent feeds.
I also like that it collects all your flagged items and keeps them in a folder (also available in RSS Bandit).
Bloglines sorely needs this feature, as I have got so many feeds with “keep new” entries that I would like to browse in one list, without this I just don’t get round to looking at them, and I wish I would as I have saved them for later use which infers an importance…a follow-up folder like in Outlook).

The feature I’m looking for is that when you subscribe to a feed, you can filter it by a keyword (similar to what the SmartFeed does, but just on one feed, not across a lot of feeds) and if you want, you can turn off the filtering as you please, by doing this the feed URL would re-adjust itself (not sure if BlogBridge can do this).

Actually I’ve mentioned before that this functionality is a feature of Web RSS Reader…the more robust RSS Readers should catch on to this essential Newsmastering feature…at the moment I do it via Blogdigger.

BlogBridge enables these sorting features:

Group articles by date
Keyword highlighting
Sort by keyword, rating, unread
And many more…

Bloglines allows you to sort items by newest to oldest, and vice versa…but the problem is that you view items by folder and not in a stream like Rojo.
So if a folder or a feed contains the latest item it goes to the top, but if it also has the 6th latest item it is also on top, so you will read the 6th latest items before the 2nd – 5th latest.
Bloglines definitely needs an option to read news in a stream, where the items are from latest to oldest. So if the same feed has the 2nd latest item and the 4th latest item, they will be separated by the 3rd latest item from another feed (so it ignores sorting by feed, or folder, and sorts purely by date, at the item level across the board).

Another feature it lacks is threading articles, this can be done on SharpReader and RSS Bandit.

Also as Robin mentioned in his article, more splicing abilities would be a plus, as then you could generate all your SmartFeeds, collect native feeds, and splice them as you please, all from within BlogBridge itself.
Then you put them in a topic folder (RSS Radar)…as mentioned earlier an RSS feed for the topic folder would be the icing on the cake.

This end result of this Newsmastering process would enable you to present the RSS feed of your topic folder (RSS Radar) in an RSS reader or re-syndicated into a blog or website via RSS Digest or integrated into a site via a Java box.

My Favourite RSS Readers

Feedmarker…see more.
Newsgator Online
Web RSS Reader …see more.
Rocket RSS Reader
Feedlounge
Bloglines…see more.
Rojo…see more.
BlogBridge
SharpReader…see more.
Lektora…see more.
RSS Bandit…see more.
Active Web Reader

Haven’t viewed FeedDemon or Newsgator Outlook or Attensa.

[ADDED 14/10/05: Rojo now has RSS for tags, and your whole account]