Library clips

In an earlier post I was finding it difficult managaing my read and unread content…now the RojoBlog announces that it has some updated features.

Now the number of unread items is denoted at the tag level as well as by each feed.

In Rojo if you have finished reading a feed and don’t mark all stories as read (mark as read), the content will stay as unread (unlike Bloglines which assumes that you have read a feed once it has been clicked-if you don’t get a chance to finish you can click “mark all new”)
….so Rojo and Bloglines work in opposite ways in this manner.

The confusing organisational thing I don’t like about Bloglines is that if you mark an item to read later (keep new), it stays as an unread item and your feed will stay in bold…why can’t there just be a separate folder for this stuff (Rojo has a separate folder for flagged items)…I mean Bloglines has folders for clipped items, why can’t it have folders for flagged items.

So if you mark a feed as read in Rojo (mark as read), you will have no unread items, naturally.
Now when you click on that feed again you will see all the items, whereas in Bloglines it is empty, and you have a choice of viewing the recent items according to time.

A new feature in Rojo is to set the feed to show only unread items (Show Unread Only), in this case the feed is empty, if you toggle it to show both read and unread items (Show Read & Unread ) you will see every item in that feed.
This is a good idea as previously you could only tell a “read item” if it was coloured dark red, as opposed to bright red for an “unread item” (maybe they should choose two different colors).

An interesting feature on Rojo is that if you click on any function within an item or post (whether to read the native site, share, flag, tag, expand/collapse) it will keep these items in a folder called “stories I’ve read”.
It must consider these items important because you have clicked on it for some reason
…I suppose it’s easier or quicker to find something you know you have clicked on before, in the “stories I’ve read”, folder compared to looking through all the items in all your feeds.

Google Personalised now enables you to read feeds of your choice via the “create a section” link.
…although it doesn’t look like a typical RSS reader, the layout looks more like Google News (where the content is displayed in sections) - it primarily displays content (similar to a heap of RSS-to-Java boxes presented on the one page) and is not a robust RSS reader with the typical reading intergace and managing features.

[via Moonwatcher]

FeedShake is another tool to add to the RSS re-mix filter collection.

Combine/merge/blend/splice (whatever you like to call it) multiple feeds…also allows you to filter for a term or to filter out a term

Actually this tool is quite unique as it is the first to do both splicing and filtering…there are many blending tools, but ReFilter seems to be the only standalone filtering tool…here are other general filtering tools.

[via RSS Compendium Blog]

On two previous posts I mentioned how you could subscribe to the results of a url or site search from an RSS engine in order to receive RSS summaries (abstract) as an alternative to subscribing to the main blog feed (as my main feed is set to full-text).

Even though Findory listed the summaries they don’t have an RSS for them, instead the RSS is for related articles to your blog posts…also noted that Waypath also has this feature.

The most effective engine according to my research was Feedster.

Well, I would like to add that BlogPulse is equally as effective as Feedster in delivering RSS summsries from an individual blog…the results are very clean (the only noise is the comments)…so the actual feed is “RSS summaries plus comments” (this is the same as Feedster).

They both return updated results…the only difference between the two is that BlogPulse only has one line of description whereas Feedster has 3 or 4 lines.

See for yourself:

Feedster [RSS]
BlogPulse [RSS]

See this post to perform a search query within an individual blog, using both Feedster and BlogPulse (plus others).

To see a synopsis of a blogs interaction with the blogosphere see BlogPulse Profiles…here’s mine.

BlogPulse Profiles is a great new feature.

Just enter a blog URL and get all the information you need in a tabbed profile sheet.

It tells ya:

Overview
-citation count
-blog post frequency
-rank trend

Posts
-recent posts plus a link to the conversation seed
-computer process keywords (similar to TagCloud, but without the actual cloud).

Citations
-recent citations from top ranked blogs and all blogs, and again a link to the conversation seed, and a link to the profile of the blog from each incoming link.

Trends
-post trend graph
-citation trend graph

Sources
These our your outgoing links
-recent news article cited
-recent blog posts cited
-other sources cites
(all with conversation seed links, and a trend link)

Neighbourhood
-a list of similar blogs, and a link to each profile
(without the pizazz of Findory neighbours)

The only thing the profile lacks is statistics from the social bookmarking communities and the web at large…but it seems that BlogPulse has compiled all the best offerings from the many Blog/RSS engines and made a very useful feature.

All we need now is a button for our sidebar like the Technorati profile, and an RSS feed for each page, similar to the PubSub LinkStats.

[via SEW blog]