Library clips

Carnival of the Infosciences is an idea that Greg at Open Stacks has initiated (although this concept is not new).

The idea is that a different blog hosts communally submitted content every week (that wasn’t put well)…here’s how Greg puts it:

“…an aggregation/roundup of the most interesting posts over a period of time, usually centering on a certain theme…the Carnival closes up shop and moves to a new blog location every week. The host blog’s author becomes the editor of the Carnival for that week”.

From another post:

“If you write something that you’d like more people to see (or write a blog that you wish more people visited), this is a way to get your stuff out there.”

“The purpose of this is to showcase the panoply of great writing within the LIS blogosphere and to expose the world to as many LIS blogs as possible, so let’s limit submissions to one per weblog per week. Naturally, we’re looking for submissions containing original thought and opinions, rather than regurgitation and reiteration. “

Here is the roster.

This is awesome, firstly you get kind of an editorial review of the week according to library blogs…the content is submitted or it is found via the blog hosts RSS reader collection…the latter is a good idea as each week you would see content coming from a different selection of blogs (unless everyone subscribes to the same library blogs, I don’t think so).

So not only is it good for a quick read on the latest according to library blogs, but it also generates discovery for new blogs…ie. the content may come from library blogs you don’t know about, and also the host blog may be a new discovery for some readers (so the carnival aspect is a great idea).

Another similar service for a weekly round up of library blogs is the This Week in LibraryBlogland series from the LISnews blog, the only thing is that this is always hosted on the same blog, and at a glance seems to be edited by the same person…so this isn’t as effective for discovery of fresh content, although still a great round up of some library essentials

…LibraryBlogLand happens every Monday, I couldn’t find a category for these posts (in order to make a category feed via Blogdigger) so I made a site search feed for the term: LibraryBlogLand via Feedster, I also made one at Feed Digest to see the difference.

Feedster RSS (LibraryBlogLand)
Feed Digest RSS (LibraryBlogLand)

I really like the idea of the travelling blog content, it’s like going to a dinner party at a different house every week…the host takes you for a tour of the house, “I like what you’ve done with the kitchen…I love these paintings”…similar to checking out someone’s blog, discovering the look of their blog and features they have, and the new discovery of checking out links within their content, and their blogroll, and maybe their incoming links, or del.icio.us links.

Carnival of discussion

Another idea would be to do a similar kind of thing, but instead of an editorial round-up, the blog host could initiate a discussion (kind of like a decentralise forum-this happens anyway in the blogosphere, but this is utilising it in an organised collective).

If the blog host had a thought provoking post (mini-essay, critique, journal article type, whatever…) this would be the grounds for some great discussion.
People do have these posts but not all of us may see them, so the idea of the Carnival is for exposure and discovery, and also to purposely initiate some discussion (with this exposure these type of blog posts would have heaps more comments and incoming links).

So how does the discussion take place?

…via comments, trackbacks, and/or incoming links (good old distributed conversations).

Problem is not all blog hosts may have trackbacks, and not all have an RSS engine incoming citations link at the end of every post

…so this may have to be done manually, maybe place a BlogPulse Conversation Tracker hyperlink at the end of the post (1st the post would have to be indexed by BlogPulse, then you’d go back and include the conversation seed link).

Preserving discussions

Unlike a forum where all conversation threads are stored under the one roof, with distributed conversations you’d have to go to the blog to view the discussion

…see an earlier post.

Firstly the roster could be hosted on a wiki (this kind of makes it everyone’s-communal and formal)

…then later you could add a link to the actual blog post under the blog host name in the roster.

You could also have a wiki page listing all the discussions, then click on the link of a discussion to see more details

…details could be the initial blog post (read the initial post, comments, and trackbacks directly from the blog post), another detail could be the BlogPulse Conversation Tracker link, and maybe also include a list of all the blog names that contributed to the discussion (from either the comments, trackbacks, or listed by BlogPulse).

NOTE: even though a new discussion is started weekly it doesn’t mean that the previous discussion has to end…

Another idea is that when a discussion has ended, maybe it could be re-published (full-text) and then you have to click to the native post to see the comments and trackbacks, etc… (this also allows to keep up with new comments, trackbacks, etc..as they are added).
This would make the wiki, more of just an index, but into a full-text archive of the initial discussi0n blog posts, but unfortunately it wouldn’t house the discussion threads so to speak.

So if we manually re-publish the initial blog post, what about the discussion…well maybe the discussion part can be re-syndicated into a wiki or even a blog (real time), to do this the blog host would need to offer an RSS feed for comments of a single post, and an RSS feed for trackbacks for a single post (sometimes these are collapsed into the same feed), otherwise an incoming links RSS can be generated from an RSS engine, but the RSS for comments on a single post would be essential.

A natural inclination would be to host this on a multi-user blog portal, but this defeats the purpose, the idea is to augment the distributed conversations in the blogosphere (no restrictions or pressure, don’t have to be part of a club, you can utilise your blog to take part in something then go on your own way if you like), there doesn’t need to be organisation of a system, let that flow organically, it’s just having a roster and then glueing the conversation by RSS…plus having members of a blog portal would ruin the discovery aspect (so we don’t want all the automation and convenience for this sytem to work well defeating the actual purpose of what we are trying to achieve in the first place).

All the wiki/blog would be doing is re-publishing or re-purposing the content, collecting stuff and organising it after the fact (I suppose using RSS is just after the fact, and is automatic-no fuss) into a presentation portal.
What it is not doing is setting up a publishing platform, the magic happens in the chaos of the web (people’s own blogs) and is glued by RSS and presented in an archive for a centralised browsing/searching starting point.

The Blog as a Sharp Tool for Research is a post by group blog Cosmic Variance (physics blog) that is playing around with similar ideas, but to accomodate for the nuances of the physics community

…Christina’s LIS rant quotes the important stuff from Clifford’s post.

In this example the word “system” seems to refer to a registery (kind of like the participation roster), and not a multi-user blog system, although it is suggesting to use the same blog (this seems more effort for participation)

…it isn’t taking advantage of people using their own blogs (benefits of discovering new blogs, and also people want to publish in their own blogs anyway…also getting away from the more centralised inhibited formal system).

In my ideal system you don’t need a blog to comment or be a member to comment, but you do need one to post (whether it’s adding to the discussion or the initial post itself-I suppose you could be a guest on a friends blog if you don’t have your own blog to host a discussion).

I think we have the new technology (RSS) to collate distributed conversations, so we don’t need a formal platform neccessarily, the only formal bit would be preserving the content in a wiki at the end (this way there is no formality of a system or club, it’s just freedom of discussion from your own place).

So I guess it’s not asking people to do anything new, it’s the blogosphere as per usual (posting from your own blog, and commenting on others)…the only difference is in the invitation to speak (stuff you’d speak about anyway)…and your post will have more exposure and is archived in a discussion portal (more for your money).

On a previous post I mentioned using Durl in order to get an RSS feed to see any new people who bookmark a certain page in del.icio.us (ie. the del.icio.us URL page for a particular bookmark-usually link to this by clicking on “and ? others” next to each bookmark).

This is a URL page of a bookmark from one of my blog posts…at the bottom you will now see an RSS button (this displaces the immediate need of durl).

Not sure how long this has been implemented, but I just noticed it!

Rojo has implemented a great feature to display information from it’s RSS reader/Bookmark Manager content called Scriptlets

…so now you can display the latest contents from stuff you read for all to see on the sidebar of your blog (or wherever).

I suppose it’s another way of sharing the contents from your information sources (if you dare), well at least the stuff you get from your RSS reader.

Great web 2.0 stuff implementation, interacting your RSS reader with your blog.

You can do this a number of ways:

Recent stories from your Rojo account
I wonder if you can limit this to a tag (In Rojo instead of folders, you can organise content by tags, this means the same feed can live in more than one place)

Recent stories you have flagged

Recent stories you have shared
What about the other way around, stories you and your contacts are sharing, ie. recent stories from your collective Rojo contacts…and even filtered by tag

Recent stories by tag (personal clippings folder) or by tag from the Rojo community (similar to a social bookmark manager)

…you can even customise the look and number of results
…I wonder if you can make certain feed tags, or story tags, or even a single feed or a single story, private, so it is not re-syndicated.

Now I posted something kind of similar a while back…I wanted an RSS of my Bloglines account so I could re-syndicate (using one of the many tools) the latest from my Bloglines account into the sidebar of my blog.

A post I made the other day takes this idea further and pushes it to a summary of your latest RSS reader content organised into computer generated tags (hot keywords)

Other ways of sharing sources and stories:

Share your OPML
(just to view, not to re-syndicate)

Superfan
(choose from the re-syndicate toolbox to generate code from the RSS feed)

Search your OPML
(choose from the re-syndicate toolbox to generate code from the RSS feed)

Public RSS Reader

Social bookmark manager latest bookmarks

I still think it would be great if you could get an RSS feed instead/as well as the code for all these new services from Rojo…this way you could, for example, get the feed for recent stories from your Rojo account whack it into a 3rd party re-mixer to filter some search terms, taking it that one step further in customisation…then generate the code via another 3rd party service.

Feed Findings is yet another re-mixing tool (splice and filter up to 10 feeds - also mentions it has Boolean operators).

I’ve changed my email subscription from bot-a-blog to Feedblitz

They have had a great take up, nearly 2000 subscribers within the first 2 weeks, what an awesome effort!

Feedblitz enables you to track subscribers and so forth, seems the next best thing for RSS-to-email…also you can import your subscriptions from bloglet….check out the comparison.

I like their pitch, it not only promotes their RSS-to-email but it just simply rings true…from the website:

“Why bother blogging to email? Because not everyone’s ready for blogging, RSS, Atom, XML, aggregators… The jargon is enough to put all except the most dedicated off. And that means that you’re losing readers.

Email is ubiquitous. Everyone has email. When you publish your blog or RSS feed using FeedBlitz you are taking advantage of the one communications medium you know everybody has. And because it’s familiar to everyone, it’s an easy task to get readers to sign up. You get more readers - in some cases, more than 50%! With FeedBlitz it’s simple.

50% Circulation Boost - How do we know? Personal experience. We run a corporate blog with a small circulation. According to FeedBurner, it’s typically accessed by aggregators representing about 40 individuals. Then we added email capability, including sign-up forms on the web site and in the email newsletter. An additional 30 people now get the blog via email - that’s a 75% circulation boost. For negligible extra effort. Not too shabby.”

Like bloglet, it works the other way, you can use Feedblitz in replace of an RSS reader for current awareness (to an extent), subscribe to as many feeds as you like, and receive an email showing the full post.
The benefit of email is that you can archive every post and use the search facility to find content, especially with Gmail.

When you are sent a notification it shows all new posts from all your subscriptions in the one email, this works different than other services, such as R|Mail…where you get an email sent just for one feed, so you’d probably get heaps more of emails if you subscribed to multiple feeds, also R|Mail doesn’t have an account login page to view your details.

Although, since R|mail requires a new subscription for every feed, it enables it to be used with Gmail as an RSS reader.

Apparently podcast (enclosure feeds) are coming soon.

Here is their blog.

Here are 2 posts from a while back, trialing RSS-to-email:
RSS to email?
RSS to Email wrapup

Here are some RSS/Email type bookmarks from my Furl account.

BlogSieve, yet another RSS re-mixer:

Splice (up to 5 feeds)
Filter (in/out)
Sorting

I really think at the moment that no-one can out do FeedDigest (bonus re-syndicating as java, html, etc…also set up as an account of all your re-mixes).

Only thing is that filtering out a search term requires a positive term…from a comment on one of my posts by developer of FeedDigest:

“Feed Digest supports negative terms. Just put a minus sign before the particular word, and entries with that word are stripped out. Of course, there must be at least one positive/other term. It’s like Google.”

Added to the list.

[via CogDogBlog]

arxiv are enabling trackbacks for all papers.

This is a great idea, now when you view a paper you can see who as blogged about this paper in the blogosphere…kind of like citations from other papers (like CiteBase), but blogs instead.
Does this mean blogs are considered worthy by the academic/research community…about time they are being incorporated into the bigger picture.

…maybe comments will be next for those non-bloggers.

Another idea would be to bookmark the article in CiteULike or Connotea and add to the string of comments…arxiv could have a link to the where the bookmark lives in the social bookmark manager (kind of like an external comments page).

…imagine if these social bookmark managers had trackbacks, I think Tagsurf has, (but this isn’t exactly a social bookmark manager).

Why didn’t the LIS repositories think of this…I think it’s ready for our repositories to plug-in to trackbacks.

Here is an example of a trackback on a paper from arxiv.

I really love the idea of using trackback to share distributed conversations…other examples Topic exchange, Lazy Web…it does have a difference to incoming links from an RSS engine as you (the sender) are doing the work, and not the person you are talking about….ie.the original person doesn’t have to keep track of viewing incoming links, as they are being spoonfed (sent directly and being notified).

Links:
Blogging arxiv
arxiv.org Joins the Blogosphere!
Trackbacks and the ArXivs

I love the fact that people play around with the functions of web 2.0 applications….mixing and matching, creating new combinations and ways of doing things…very much lateral thinking.

I’ve heard about this before but didn’t try it till recently…using Gmail as your RSS reader (you’d probably want to set up a seperate account if you have a lot of feeds).

How it works for me

• I went to Rmail (a service that delivers feed content into your email)
• I entered the RSS feed I want to track, and then I entered my email (gmail)
• Here is the trick, gmail enables you to use aliases (see 2 links below for more)

  …and then I entered my email address with the name of the blog/feed as an alias
  eg. johntropea+howtosavetheworld@gmail.com

• Then click subscribe
• Now goto your gmail account and find the email from Rmail asking you to confirm the request
• Apply a label to this email, I used the blog/feed name, “howtosavetheworld”
• Then goto the top of gmail and click on “create a filter”
• In the “To:” field I entered the email alias address
  eg. johntropea+howtosavetheworld@gmail.com
• Then click on “Next step”
• Tick “Skip the Inbox”
• Tick “Apply the label:”, and choose the label you made earlier, “howtosavetheworld”
• Lastly click “Create filter”

Your filter should look something like this:

Matches: to:(johntropea+howtosavetheworld@gmail.com)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “howtosavetheworld”

Now whenever that blog makes a post, Rmail gets the feed, changes it to email and sends it to me.

The gmail accepts it by filtering who it is sent to (this is where the alias does its thing) and then skips the inbox and deposits it in a label.

When this happens the label turns bold, alerting me of a new entry to read from that feed.

When I click on the label I can see the latest post titles of the in the subject line.

Choose a post or email from the subject line and you can read the contents of the post in the body of your email.

Once I have read it, the bold disappears, and the entry stays archived within that label…or you can label it otherwise, it’s up to you.

Searching through past entries is a breeze with gmail’s searching capabilities.

So there you have it, using Gmail as a basic level web-based RSS reader…what a great idea, and it’s not some half assed hack, it really works well.

Only basic feature missing is folders for your labels, ie. organising your feeds into folders.

NOTE: you could use the “From:” field as the filter, and enter “Rmail” as the value, but if you plan to subscribe to more than one feed via the Rmail service this won’t be a unique enought filter, that’s why the gmail alias is great.

Here are the informing posts:
Rmail and Gmail, or how to collect the world
GMailRSS: GMail as an RSS reader.

Here are some posts about creating aliases with gmail:
Gmail + Aliases
How to use Gmail aliases to organise emails and handle spam

The Bee Blog has a good idea about substituting a blogroll with the latest buzz (posts) from a blogroll.

You could do this 2 ways:

If your blogroll (usually your OPML) had an RSS feed, you could re-syndicate it the usual way via a javascript box for the sidebar of your blog…this would show the latest posts from your blogroll.

Problem is my Bloglines OPML doesn’t have an RSS feed, I’d have to use a tool like FeedDigest to splice all the feeds in my OPML into a re-mix RSS feed…or export my OPML into a Blogdigger Group, which in turn has an RSS feed (then whack the java code into the sidebar).
…see more here.

The other way has a step before seeing actual post titles

…splice all your blogroll or OPML (I guess your blogroll may be just a portion of your OPML) into a feed at TagCloud, then re-syndicate the code of your-computer generated hot keywords-from your blogroll/OPML into your sidebar.

In this way, from your sidebar, you can click on hot keywords from your blogroll/OPML, this takes you to the TagCloud website to view these posts.

It’s almost like having your RSS reader (OPML) content (organized by keyword) on the sidebar of your blog

…great idea!

Planet Web. 2.0 is an example of a public RSS aggregator using Chumpologica…via Read/Write Web.

Similar tools:

PlanetPlanet…see Planet IM
SimpleAggregator…see LISfeeds
FeedWordpress…see rss tools

NOTE: the name of the Public RSS aggregator “rss tools” has changed to “gas” (doesn’t make sense to me, the variation in the blogroll seems a bit odd).

More manual ways:

Blogdigger groups
Superblog
Bloglines public
Remix some feeds and present them on a blog via Feed Digest (then list all the blogs [contributors] on the sidebar)

Related posts:

More than one way to curate a blog!
Public RSS aggregator: make your own!
RSS: transport topics

As I mentioned in a comment on IncSub, I’m yet to see a Public RSS aggregator where the blogroll or source blogs open within the aggregator, ie. when you click on a source blog it shows the latest posts…Blogdigger groups is the only tool that does this (only excerpts)!
…the other tools only show the lastest posts from the source blogs.

Although one thing I noticed about FeedWordpress is that all posts also carry over the categories from the source blogs, so you can search within the Public RSS Aggregator by category (the category heading lists the total of all categories from all the source blogs)

….so this uses the source blog categories, it doesn’t make a category up, like tools such as K-Collector.

We need the best of these two tools to come together…ie. we need Public RSS aggregators such as FeedWordpress, Planet Planet, etc… to work like a Bloglines Public RSS reader where each feed (listed on the blogroll) opens within the tool itself.

…here is a comparison

• Blogdigger groups - simple log-in set up, hosted site, don’t need expertise, easy enough for the lay person

  FeedWordpress - need some expertise to install a system

• Blogdigger groups - usually the blogs (and feeds) that make up the content of this public aggregator are listed on the sidebar, clicking on one will limit the results to just that feed (it would be good to select multiple feeds)
  …this is unique as you can view content from any of the source blogs anytime you like all within the Blogdigger Group (kind of like a Bloglines Public Reader).

  FeedWordpress - clicking on one of these will launch to the native site, you can’t see the latest content within FeedWordpress manually (unless you use the categories)

• Blogdigger groups - search RSS feed, as well at the per feed level

  FeedWordpress - n/a

• FeedWordpress - RSS comments

  Blogdigger groups - n/a

• FeedWordpress - post looks virtually the same as the native blog

  Blogdigger groups - post isn’t a replicate version, and it is only an excerpt

• FeedWordpress - optimum customisation and presentation, total control

  Blogdigger groups - limited presentation, can only choose the content

• FeedWordpress - also displays the categories of every source blog

  Blogdigger groups - no categories

Copyright

The Read/Write post goes on to mention infringement issues with this new automated newsmastering process, and whether there are copyright issues on re-constituting content word for word…check out the comments.

I guess as long as you respect the copyright notice on the blog you are re-syndicating, and as long as you reference mark the source at the end of the post (as reblog does, and the other Public RSS Aggregators mentioned above), and the post links back to the source I don’t see a problem…as long as people are aware they are reading a compilation of content and the owner of the website is a curator and not an author.
The editor of the website could add a note explaining that the contents from this aggregated blog is not original but compiled from the blogs on the blogroll.

How are these sites different from a Bloglines public account or a Blogdigger group at first glance?

I guess it is in the presentation and purpose…whereas with the 2 above you are always aware it’s part of a service…whereas with PlanetPlanet and the others a layperson may not know the editor is not authoring the content.

What if you re-syndicate the content from a Technorati search on a blog (not on the sidebar, but in the actual body contents of the blog)…all posts will be from other people, you will be presenting an aggregated view of a topic without authoring anything and obviously the content is coming from a myrid of blogs so you can’t keep up with the copyright of each blog…how is automated newsmastering different than search engine results…I suppose automated newsmastering has one purpose, but in the end they are both publishing the work of others without asking them.

I suppose search engines aren’t designed with a re-publishing purpose, they are designed more for findability, so you can click to the site, whereas automated newsmastering has only one purpose and that is re-publishing content to form your own topic portal (maybe automated newsmastering is more fair if it is excerpts and not full-text as the authors at least have a chance for click-through’s.

• you could specifiy the search engine bots to not index your site
• you could have a copyright notice, disallowing people to re-syndicate your feed unless given permission (or protect your feed somehow)

For more see these 2 articles:
The Copyright Debate & RSS
Protecting RSS Feeds From Commercial Republication

The newsmastering blog, rss tools (via FeedWordpress), is a prime example of a Public RSS aggregator.

The content is made up of 15 blogs (mine is featured) that are all listed in the blogroll, it also collects the category a post belongs to from the native blog, so the category list has every category from all 15 blogs…this makes it a long list.

NOTE: “rss tools” now called “gas”, actually has added more than 15 source blogs recently.

As mentioned before an alternative to this is using a method such as K-Collector, or even using a tool such as TagCloud….you could splice together all 15 blogs into one RSS feed, then put the javascript code into your sidebar…so now instead of categories, you have computer generated hot keywords.
Only problem is that when you click on a keyword you will be taken to the TagCloud website to see the contents, whereas the way rss tools is currently set up you can view the content by category within the rss tools blog.

Actually I found that Planet IM, LISfeeds, and Planet Web 2.0 lack archives like a calendar or categories…if a post drops off the front page, it is gone (unless you have the RSS contents cached in your RSS reader). Whereas FeedWordpress, eg. rss tools, is more of a content archive as it archives all posts, and they are findable via a search box, a calendar and by categories.

Coming back to the discussion I only found out about my blog being a contributor (or as now labelled as an associate) on this site, as it appeared on my incoming links. It felt a bit weird to discover that my contents was being re-syndicated without being asked…it could seem to look like a group blog to some people, and it is really, but the contributors don’t even know they are contributing.
In the end I don’t mind being under the banner, presentation, and purpose of “rss tools” (I don’t mind its theme, but if I did mind???)

Weird thing about the web 2.0 re-mix culture is that it is too easy to re-syndicate content without asking the owner of the content…is this an issue…but what about the exposure….do you want to be affiliated…these questions are even more prominent with native feeds compared to remix or search engine feeds (3rd party).

Maybe an email could be sent to blog owners asking permission to include the feed contents of your blog onto their aggregated feed topic portal (Public RSS aggregator)…it would be different if you were re-syndicating search feeds from an RSS engine as the content is made up from various blogs, and it is only excerpts (if you are OK with your feed being indexed by a search engine, than you should be OK being re-syndicated into a Public RSS aggregator).
But then again you can limit the search in an RSS engine to just the content of one feed, via a site search…see here.

So besides not having the chance to decide whether you want to be affiliated on a Public RSS aggregator (because of the openness of RSS content) there is also the issue of whether your blog posts are annotated correctly with you as the author and if the post title links back to your site…so far all the Public RSS aggregators I have seen do this well.

But of late I’ve realised that “rss tools” no longer does this…each post mentions the source blog it came from but is not hyperlinked to the source blog, it also has the date-mark, and category via the source blog, but the category link opens within “rss tools” itself…and the title of the post also opens within “rss tools” itself.
The only thing that links back to the source blog is on the blogroll.

The main problem I have is that the title of the post doesn’t link to the source blog, unlike reading the post in an RSS reader like Bloglines and clicking on the title to go to the native feed.

Also the issue of clicking on a source blog in the blogroll and having it show the contents within the Public RSS aggregator, and not launch to the native site still isn’t solved.
The blog roll could have 3 links for each blog/source:
1. link to the blog home page
2. link to the native feed
3. link to the blog contents within the Public RSS aggregator

There is also the issue of comments…should a Public RSS aggregator allow comments?
Reason I ask is that if someone leaves a comment on the Public RSS aggregator version of my post, how will I know or respond…people will be commenting on my posts and I wouldn’t know, I’d rather they comment on my blog.

In the examples at the start of this post Planet IM, LISfeeds, and Planet Web 2.0 all list the source blogs in the blog roll with the feeds (displaying the feeds is important for visibility). It would be also good to augment this by displaying the source feed next to each post as well…this way the source blogs are getting more exposure
…the Public RSS aggregator my blog is featured on (rss tools) doesn’t display feeds on the blogroll.

Another issue is that a Public RSS aggregator has an RSS feed (the one in question, rss tools, re-syndicates 15 blogs, so the RSS feed is spliced with all these 15 blogs).
So if people subscribe to this feed, they don’t need to subscribe to my native feed, so now I have competition from my own content.

What is stopping someone from making a Public RSS aggregator based on just re-syndicating one feed (kind of defeats the purpose)…this would be a replica of someone’s blog.

Extra

Just came across this portal for the nptech community…it is a public RSS aggregator and more…we will just look at the aspects related to this post.
…it doesn’t hint at the software used, but it seems you’d need to be a techie.

On the sidebar there is a heading called “Navigation”, under it you can click on the News Aggregator link (same as the “news feeds” heading on the top), this shows a list of posts:

-Title of each post goes to the native site (so there are no permalinks within the nptech Public News aggregator…so I’m still yet to find a tool that does this)
-Also has a source link
-It seems a moderator must scan posts and categorise them

Back to the sidebar if you click on Categories this shows a list of categories:

-Brief title of latest posts within each category…all link to the native site

Click on more, or on the sidebar choose a category in full view, I’ll choose nptech watch, this shows:

-Latest posts by one category…so the display is similar to the “News Aggregator” page, except it is by one category (all titles link to the native site)

Also note on the right sidebar always shows latest posts for each categories (in the usual javascript type boxes)

Back to the sidebar if you click on Sources, it reveals the sidebar blogroll…in the body it lists:

-Brief title of latest posts within each source…all link to the native site

Click on more, or on the sidebar choose a source in full view, I’ll choose Beth’s Blog, this shows:

- Latest posts by one source… so the display is similar to the “News Aggregator” page, and viewing posts within just one “Category”, except now it is by one source (all titles link to the native site)

The top of the page displays the blog source name, description of the blog, URL, and feed.

Now if you go to the top of the page there is a link called Blogs, this isn’t really part of the automated Public RSS aggregator from what I can tell, I think it is a space for people to submit blog posts…well actually it seems like it is set up as in-house generic blogs (like a multi-user blog system)…there is also an RSS feed (but lacks an OPML)

If you click on the title of a post, or the “read more” link it goes to a permalink

If you click on the source of the post it goes to a user page..I’ll click on a post with the source being eweinb04

This page displays some history, if you click on “view recent blog entries” it goes to an actual in-house blog, with a feed, and permalinks for each post.

It would be good for these in-house blogs to be listed in the sidebar as a blogroll, and maybe an OPML to boot.

So it seems this is a multi-user blog system, as well as a Public RSS aggregator, amongst other features in this portal.