Library clips

There has been much interest in new ways to read RSS feeds, as the traditional RSS reader layout is falling victim to RSS overload for the addicted advanced users.

So far:

Personalisation

Findory
Findory neighbours

Filtering

Filter for search terms for each individual feeds or subscribe to a category feed…see more

Search your whole subscription for keywords (via Bloglines)

Import your OPML into a Blogdigger Group and create several search RSS feeds…or just use Feedster OPML search.

Auto-tagging

Import your OPML into a TagCloud
Personal Bee Keyphrases

Threading

Sharpreader threading
“Advanced threading support allowing you to view connected items together in a threaded fashion. SharpReader detects and shows connections between items if they have same link, if one item links to another, if two items both link to the same external webpage, or if an item has comments (for feeds supporting the standard).”

Commonsense

Instead of subscribing to lots of search feeds, and bookmark feeds (I can’t keep up with the RSS tag on del.icio.us) seek out some blogs that specialise in topics (you have to rely on others), try finding some at Technorati Blog Finder or Rojo feed tags…also check out some Public aggregators such as Blogdigger Groups, Public Bloglines, and services like Planet! Planet! (I haven’t yet discovered a directory for public RSS aggregators).

Network Visualisation

NusEye visualisation graphs…here is the paper

Word occurences within a feed (item content)
Word occurences amongst all feeds (source content)
Common feeds in blogrolls (subscription affiliation)

Here is a great insight in the problem of deciding which feeds to put in which folders:

“While it makes sense to separate sport and political webfeeds, an event like the Olympics generates content that spans both categories. Individual sources may be better clustered around the topic of “The Olympics”, for the period of time that their content focuses on the event. Again, the user is forced to expend cognitive effort to glean such trends from the chosen sources. In summary, while current webfeed aggregators use familiarity to good effect, encouraging adoption, they give no support for capturing subtle underlying relations in aggregated content”

Item content network
“This graph can give the user a sense of the important terms in a currently selected feed along with how those terms cluster and connect”

Source content network
“…a hot term…commented by many webfeeds can easily be identified”.

…so far it sounds like TagCloud or Personal Bee, except for the network visual element.

Subscription affiliation
“The top 100 webfeeds, ranked by appearance in a blogroll…”
…this is based on registering your blogroll.

RSS readers like Rojo enable you to tag feeds into multiple folders, so you could go through your feeds and tag the relevant one’s into your new Olympics tag for the time being - later on you can dispose of this tag, without losing the feeds you want to keep as some are listed in your other tags….also Rojo can rank top feeds from its users subscription lists.

So it seems that you can already identify item content, and source content, and also the subscription affiliation…the only difference is viewing it as a visual network, instead of the traditional 2 or 3 pane RSS reader view or a tag cloud.

Check out the diagrams of NusEye on the mentioned links above.

Looking forward to see further developments.

Similar posts:

Blog Clouds
Blog Ranking: Incoming links??

Supr.c.ilio.us is a list of all the social bookmark/folksonomy type services
…but check it out, it’s no ordinary list it is actually a folksonomy for folksonomies

…he! he!

[via Science Library Pad]

According to this post OPML files are a handy way to exchange lists…usually I see OPML files as a collection of feeds from an RSS reader, but they are more than this, they can house a list of text/links made in an OPML outliner.

From the post:

“I can pull together a point of view with supporing exhibits, and publish the entire package to the web as a living, constantly updated knowledge environment

…use OPML to make a personalised online work environment for my daily research and writing”

So how do people view these OPML outlines (lists)?

Well they can have a URL and be published on the web and are viewed as a tree, and can be searched in an OPML search engine.
Instead of needing a blog or website for a daily updated presentation of new links to add to to your topic or bibliography list, you can use an outline list, an OPML list is much more suited for its simplicity as a focused topic packet list…you could make heaps of lists that you update and maintain…here is an OPML outline for the U.S. Constitution in OPML…and here is the OPML file.

These lists are published online, shareable, intergrated, can be modified, easily updated….and the items in the list aren’t just confined to text, they can point to webpages, and other file formats…all the benefits of the web 2.0 environment without really needing to know HTML.

Now what I was thinking, can an OPML outline have an RSS feed, so I know if something new has been added to the OPML
…I guess this is what Superfan does for the Bloglines OPML.

So a tool like del.icio.us can hold a list of links and organise the links into tags, but they only go to one level, where as an OPML outline is different visually (similar to a directory tree), and can also hold content other than just web links, and it also very simple and versatile…it’s the precise tool needed for the job it needs to do.

RSS reader overload is starting to take its toll as it is now way too easy to subscribe to lots of stuff, and with the explosion of blogs and RSS search feeds there is so much good stuff out there…so I’m always interested in new ways to read content.

Previously I mentioned the Personal Bee RSS reader - in addition to traditional feed reading it can also “bubble” up tag clouds (auto-tagged hot keywords) to read the latest items…so instead of slogging through your river of news or reading feed by feed, you can just choose to read by auto-tagged items (keyphrases) and leave the rest out of which you have no interest, similar to TagCloud.

This certainly helps with information overload as you don’t have to read every item in every feed that you subscribe to, and at the same time you don’t have to get rid of any feeds to reduce the overload…you are keeping all your feeds but just choosing to read specific items via automated key tags (key phrases).

This sounds great, you don’t have to throw out any feeds (phew!!), and you don’t have to slog through everything, as there is the option to only view stuff you are interested in within your collection of feeds, just choose the tag from the cloud…this sounds like a dream

…only thing is that you have to trust the Personal Bee parser in extracting and ranking the keyphrases (it’s worth a shot).

So how is it different to TagCloud, well for starters it is an RSS reader, but how is the keyword extraction different…here is the unique method according to the new instruction, HOW-TO Be a Beekeeper:

“Each Bee edition ranks topics (i.e. keyphrases) proportional to their popularity within the interest window and inversely proportionally to their historical popularity. It’s a simple concept, yet it works well. Consider for instance the topic “Google.” Without an established historical baseline, the topic “Google” would constantly rank high on the topic list, thus pushing down other potentially new and interesting topics. In a Bee edition, “Google” would rarely make the topic list because of its high historical popularity. Instead, the day Google announced “Google Talk,” that topic immediately reached the top of the ranked topic list because the phrase “Google Talk” was mentioned 100’s of times and had no history in the edition.”

…And since a popular topic requires multiple mentions before its ranking increases, it can take several days for interesting topics to “bubble” to the top of the list. As a corollary, topics at the top of the list can take several days to “fade away.”

…The Personal Bee tracks multi-word keyphrases rather than single keywords. Single keywords are simply too general and/or ambiguous

So the difference is that it seems to be effective in teasing out keyphrases for new unique terms, which is great for current awareness.

The idea of Personal Bee is to house folders of topical content, and invite others to see…these folders are called Editions (just like a Bloglines folder)…so you could call a folder/edition, “Folksonomy”, and include blogs that specialise in folksonomies, or even include category feeds from blogs that have categories such as tags, folksonomy, social bookmarks, etc…, then also include a few RSS search feeds, or even del.icio.us, Furl, or Technorati Tag feeds…whatever you like, Google News, etc…

Then give it a month or two to do its work, and it will generate keyphrases in order to browse/view your edition - instead of flicking through every page of the newspaper, so to speak, stories are grouped into topic tags, and the unique tags to your edition are ranked highly as they are considered important or pressing topic news.

There are intentions to augument this process with human based rating and tagging…look forward to see how it pans out.

Some options of searching your blog and including a search box in your blog

How often is the site re-indexed, most important aspect for blogs?

How well does it index and returns results…and ranking?

This post lists ways to site search your blog.

Built-in search box

Mine isn’t very good, returns are in full-text…I’d rather just the description from the text where the term appears, with the term highlighted (like Google)

Blogs I read

This searches the web, your blog, and your blogroll (OPML export URL) via Google

…another way to search your OPML.

FreeFind

Free to join and they will index your site daily, your own personal search engine.

Google Sitemaps

Ping Google to let them know you have updated your content and they will be alerted to re-index your site.

I just checked mine for the first time in 2 days, and it read last downloaded 6 hours ago, not sure whether you’re meant to continuously ping (re-submit) Google Sitemaps or if it automatically re-indexes

…now to just boost my rankings.

See the post for the low down, Your blog and Google Sitemaps: summary, and note on feeds

Here is a Google Sitemap Video Tutorial

Pinging RSS engines

Technorati Searchlet

Blogdigger-search your blog

Feedster-my feed search

…I’m sure there are plenty of others

Here are some pinging services:

Ping-O-Matic
KingPing
Pingoat
Feed Shark

Social bookmarks

This seems to be a real reliable method of creating a search tool for you blog as you are the indexer (so you can rely on yourself)
…by that I mean you can bookmark a post immediately after you publish an entry, as long as you remember, this is faster than a bot can crawl or RSS can ping
…this is like having a back up version of your blog, browsable by tag, and searchable, and viewed by a different community.

Of course this will only work with services that cache full text, such as Furl, Spurl, and Simpy.

Another great feature is that it enables searching within a category (subject fielded search for your blog)…this is unique compared to the other services
…Simpy even goes further.

The only thing is that these services (not sure about Spurl) don’t offer code to put a search box on your site, and if they did it word be great to include a drop down box of the categories (these would match your blog categories)

…I mentioned some of this a while back.

Question for LazyWeb

I copied code from somewhere on the web for a Feedster search my OPML box, this code was made up by someone as Feedster don’t provide the code themselves

…so I’m wondering does anybody know how to generate code for a search box from Furl, Spurl, or Simpy…drop-down tag menu would be awesome?

Here is the home-made code for the Feedster search my OPML box…if this helps:

<form target=_new name=’feedsterform’ action=’http://www.feedster.com/search.php’><input type=’text’ size=’10′ name=’q'/><input type=’submit’ value=’Search’/><br /><!– <input type=’radio’ value=’inrss’ name=’scope’>My Blog<br /><input type=’radio’ value=’inopml’ name=’scope’/>Blogs I Read–><input type=’hidden’ name=’searchtype’ value=’exsearch’/><input type=’hidden’ name=’inopml’ value=’http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=johnt’/><input type=’hidden’ name=’inrss’ value='’/><input type=’hidden’ name=sort value=’date’/></form>

[ADDED 12/10/05: RawSugar: blog search box and directory]

[ADDED 24/10/05: Swicki: mini-search engine ]

[ADDED 24/10/05: Rollyo: roll your own mini search engine (coming soon!)]

[ADDED 19/12/05: Google Blog Search]

[ADDED 21/05/06 : Simpy search box]