Library clips

Library Stuff has the stuff on Feedmail…a new service where you can send and receive email via personalised RSS feeds (so instead of one general address you have an address for each contact).

Technorati Blog Finder is a new venture into the blog directory scene.

Good thing about this is the blog categories are assigned by the user (up to 20)…the system already suggests 20 categories based from the most frequent categories you use on your blog, but as mentioned you can change these to your liking.

You can search for a category or browse the cloud, the ranking (for the list) or weighting (for the cloud) are still based on the usual most incoming links, so they are like topic based 100 lists.

Otherwise sort by recently updated (this is definitely needed as a blog with heaps of incoming links may stay on top even though they haven’t blogged in a while), or alphabetically (great for those on the bottom to be seen, unless you don’t have many incoming links and your blog starts with “Z”, well then you can’t be helped as of yet).

So they have gone a step further, discovery by topics (and user defined, awesome I’ll just make up some unique category that I’ll claim to be an expert on and rank top of the list, but then no-one will think to look up such a unique category).

…it would be good to subscribe to an RSS of the lastest blogs within a tag, kind of like what Superfan does for Bloglines for a given users account.

But still there is the 2nd step, the ranking issue, how do we view blogs in the opaque web (ie. past the first 100 hits or so where no-one will bother looking)…even though they are in topics, the number of hits within each topic can still be high
…it’s a great step to discover experts or like blogs on a topic, but what about discovering community clouds of conversation and influence.

Not sure how Rojo rank their blogs, but they have a folksonomy both for tagged items/stories, and for organised/tagged feeds (ie. the tags user apply to organise their feeds are made shareable for discovery via a folksonomy)…you can browse the tag cloud (feed directory so to speak), search for a tag, or browse the 1st 10 hits…you can sort by most recent or popularity (this must be most subscribed to in Rojo, instead of incoming links)…you can also choose the tag cloud from “all users”, “contacts”, or “me”

[via TechCrunch]

PeanutButterWiki is another free hosted wiki site

…others are Wikicities, seedwiki, swiki and Wikispaces.

[thanks TechCrunch]

[ADDED: 1/11/05 Here are some more]

Just a moment ago I reviewed Reader2 (a folksonomy for books) and now here’s another one, Library Thing (free version only allows 200 items).

Besides all the regular features, and functionality this one has images, comments, profile page, and LOC card catalogue for each item where available.
There is a “preferences” link to change these header settings in your user account, eg. you can choose from more fields like ISBN, summary, subject, call no….and these can be aligned left to right in any order….very versatile for personal use!
…beware that if you don’t have a “cover” column you can’t link to a native website eg. Amazon, as the Images have the links and not the Titles.

Also has an A-Z or Z-A sorting function by:

User (homepage only)
Title
Author
Date
Tags

Search function is simple and effective (where’s the fielded search, we’re talking a library catalogue here).

Also print a list.

Home page

Link to the native page via the image
Link to a user
Link to a tag

User page

Link to the native page via the image
Link to a tag

Lacks linking to an author from bookmarks in the Home page or User account, need to browse the Statistics page”.
From this page you can view link lists to:

Most recent users
Users with the largest libraries
Entire library
Most popular tags
Most popular books
Most popular authors

(but you can’t get complete lists, there is no “see all” link)

If you look at a users tag page, it will say who else used that tag, but seems to be lacking who else bookmarked the same page as you (then again this is tricky as someone might point to a URL at Amazon and someone might point to a URL at another bookseller…actually in this folksonomy the native links seem to all go to Amazon, so this wouldn’t be a problem after all)
The URL feature would be good as you could also implement a running thread of comments on a book, add also a ratings function…this would act kind of like a book club, why not add a groups feature so you can be part of a real virtual book club.

Adding an item

I don’t find this screen very clear, but I worked out if I enter an ISBN in the search term field it automatically fills in all the data in the fields, kind of similar to CiteULike or Connotea.

If you enter a search term like: lord of the rings it will bring up a list to choose from, so if LOC hasn’t indexed the book then you can’t add it (seems restrictive, not sure if I’m correct)…you can also search by other fields (manual search) to locate a book.

Seems to lack RSS feeds (hopefully coming soon)

…also if I find something I like on the Home page or wherever, there is no way to copy that item into my library (as far as I can see).

The About page points to a similar site called bibliophil (seems to work on ratings more than tags).

[via Library Stuff]

ADDED 5/08/05: New Social features

Yesterday I mentioned the new web-based word processing tool Writley.

So you can invite others to edit the document hosted on your account, and once you publish your document you can invite people to see, but you also have an option to let anyone view your document.

So here is a permalink to the Writely published version of my previous post…wow a back-up for my posts, and two places to see them.

The beauty of this now is that I can upload a word document and publish it on my Writely account, I can then point to this permalink from a blog post…how cool is that…it’s like pointing to the permalink of a photo you have in Flickr, or pointing to the permalink of a bookmark you have in Furl.

So it can virtually be a host for your word documents (my problem before was that I obviously couldn’t point to a word document on my hard drive, and I don’t own/rent any webspace…so this has solved some issues)…Furl mentioned a while ago that they were going to allow bookmarking of personal files such as word documents, this would also solve this problem (you’d just have to re-edit your word file than re-save it in Furl).

So if you have an old blog post with content like a list that you keep going back to to update with new additions, you could substitute this list to a Writely published page and add to the list when you need to and just re-publish the page…and have a link of it on your sidebar of your blog.
This is kind of similar to using a wiki I guess…it would be good if Writely had RSS feeds for published pages.

Watch out Amazon (well not really) here is Reader2, from the maker of MyProgs (the interface and functions are basically identical), this time round this folksonomy is dedicated to books.

From the website:

“This site allows you to keep a social list of the books you read and/or recommend. After you sign up you can add books to your unique list. You can view anyone else’s books and they can view yours. Extra user-defined data can be added to each book entry to organize and describe the book further such as descriptions, links, and tags. You can use tags to categorize (and thus organize) books so that you and others using this site will have an easier time finding new and interesting books to read.”

Front page

• List of Latest Tags
• Link to a Tag Cloud
• Link to Popular Tags

Each entry has:
• Date of entry
• Title of Book
• Author of book - clicking on this will show all books by this author from within a users account
• User - clicking on this will show the users account
• Description - with a link to go to the native site
• Status Tags (a choice of) - now reading, recommended, favourite, to read (within a particular users account, not all accounts)
• Type Tags (a choice of) - Fiction, Educational, Technical, Documentary, Scientific, Children’s, Religious
  NOTE: this is a field when you add a page, but when you view a bookmark it lacks a Type Tag (so what’s the purpose-maybe it hasn’t been imnplemented yet)
• Normal Tags - make up your own (if a bookmark has more than 2 tags there is also a “++” symbol, clicking on this will show all bookmarks from all users with these tags intersecting…I suppose a boolean AND search)
• ? Users - links to a URL page of a bookmark, showing all instances of users who bookmarked this URL (and a list of the common tags)

Images of book covers would be a good addition

So as you can see besides the user-defined tags, there are some otherinbuilt tag to choose from, allowing for more structure and context…so there is still the user defined part, but also some centralised organising (this still requires the user input)…kind of have a choice of browsing user-defined tags or tags users choose from a centralised list.

Tag page

Similar to the front page, but the list on the left is “related tags”

User page

Similar to the front page, but clicking on tags will be within the user account, also clicking on an author will be all bookmarks with that author within the users account

Search

Great thing about searching is that as soon as you enter 3 letters itstarts offering suggesting

Search your books

Search your tags

Search books from all users

Search tags from all users

Combine search to include or exclude tags

…and you can also limit your search to popular bookmarks

I couldn’t get the book search to work within just my account or all accounts…I searched for words in the title, words in the description, but it wasn’t finding anything (probably still in the early stages of development).

The to-do list mentions exporting features, ratings, tag bundles, and more RSS feeds

RSS feeds

Sitting there waiting in the top right hand corner of each page…there is even feeds for the author field, and the status field

…only one lacking is for the URL page of each bookmark (ie. ? users bookmarked this page)

NOTE: this post was drafted in Writley (mentioned yesterday)…here is a published version for public viewing within my Writely account.

See latest on Reader2.