Library clips

RSSor seems to have ripped the ever enigmatic del.icio.us to form an RSS Reader folksonomy.

The idea is similar to what Rojo is doing…creating a folksonomy out of all the aggregated RSS feeds from it’s user system (all users organise their feeds in tags, collecting all these tags and presenting them as an RSS feed directory in a folksonomy style).
RSSor has leveraged this concept in true folksonomy style by using the social features, look, and functionality of del.icio.us.

Rather than saving items/web pages, you are saving RSS feeds, and organising them by tags.

From their website:

“What makes RSSor a social system is its ability to let you see the RSS that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has subscribed to a specific RSS. You can also view the RSS collected by others, and subscribe to the RSS of people whose lists you find interesting.”

When you click on a title of an item (which is the title of the RSS feed, usually a blog title) it goes to a page within RSSor that shows the feed details and all the latest posts (excerpts) from that RSS feed, from here you can click on a permalink to go to the native site…see here.

If you register your own account, you can get a bookmarklet to discover the RSS feed of a website, or you can use the post link in RSSor.
So to include a new item (ie. a new RSS feed) just type in the feed URL and the tags you want to orgainse them in.

Browsing your account

When you have added a few feeds into your account and organised them into a few tags, you can browse your account.

Clicking on a tag shows contents (title only) by date order, it’s like clicking on a Rojo tag (within your account) to see all items from all feeds within the tag…see here.
NOTE: Bloglines doesn’t do this, as when you click on a folder it still shows you items sorted by feed, not mixed items from all feeds sorted by date.

Within a date you will see items from different feeds, each item has the source feed from where it came from, if you click on this it takes you to a page where you can see the latest excerpts from that feed only…see here again.
Even though this is browsing the contents of one feed, you can’t browse a list of individual feeds like a traditional RSS reader, you can only browse folders/tags that contain feeds
…a way around this is to have one feed per tag and just name the tag with the feed name (although unique tag names don’t help with other users discovering new stuff…ie. it won’t help contribute to an emerging vocabulary).

Going back to the home page…you can also copy a feed, or see a user list of people who have bookmarked the same feed…see here
…this makes for discovery of feeds within not just the whole system level but at the user level as well.

RSSor is one of the latest tools in blog discovery (with a sharing system to boot) which is taking a user approach (like Rojo) to define or tag subject aboutness of a feed instead of owner defined tags like Technorati Blog Finder…or the expert approach adopted by BlogBridge.

[ADDED: If your blog home page shows the full-text of posts, RSSor can act as a simplified alternate interface to your blog in showing excerpts of your posts…see the sidebar of my blog under “Full-text Index”
…also if your blog goes bust at least you have a place to find your old posts (well all your posts from the date RSSor came into existence)…I also like that you can clip a post to del.icio.us or Furl, or even do a del.icio.us URL lookup]

[via RSS Compendium Blog]