Library clips

Informatory is designed to be read like a newspaper…it’s a very simple and clean Public RSS Aggregator.

The front page has recent entries and you can turn the page back to previous entries (snippets) or foward.

The sources for this website are chosen by the editor, there isn’t a source list available.

Each entry is an excerpt, the “read more” link takes you to the native site.

It also has a tag/s for each post, I think this is taken from the native source as well…all tags can be seen in a tagcloud.

There is also a search option.

Here’s a difference, the Title of each post actually takes you to the permalink within the portal itself…hooray!

Only thing I don’t agree with is for every post there is trackback, and comments, and you can follow a RSS 2.0 comments as well

…I’d rather this happen on my blog!!!!!

Here is an example of one of my blog posts .

Read their about page for more.

See a related post from earlier today.

Search Engine Watch has the inside story about Google releasing the beta of their new blog search service

…google has joined the real-live web, hooray!

Now from what I can see this is a blog engine only (using RSS to index), it is not a RSS engine for the web…the content is from blogs only…so it is an RSS engine for the blogosphere.

Feedster does this by separating it’s RSS web engine from it’s RSS blog engine.

I guess with this premise Google is separating it’s News engine from its Blog engine, and from its Web engine…although the News, and Web engine aren’t indexed via RSS, they take the traditional approach…so Google Blog Search is it’s first RSS engine.

From the website:

“While Google web search has allowed you to limit results to popular blog file types such as RSS and XML in web search results for some time, and its news search includes some blogs as sources, Google hasn’t had a specialized tool to surface purely blog postings”

There still is the limit of completeness in indexing…it finds sites from pinging services then crawls within the RSS feeds…this content in turn delivers the search results
…but this content is only based on the RSS feed, if an RSS feed doesn’t offer full-text, then the blog isn’t indexed completely.

It’s a toss up between having all your content (offering full-text RSS) discovered by search engines and getting traffic that way or driving traffic to your site from people reading your RSS feed via RSS summaries.

More on this at SEW blog…mentions the Technorati approach:

“It’s not FULL TEXT blog search. Huh? If you post to a blog, you might not send out the entire text of your post in a feed. We don’t, for instance. Our reason is that we don’t want everyone assuming they can reprint our material. Jason Calacanis of Weblogs has written of similar issues despite copyright warnings in his full-text feed. But Google’s only currently searching what’s in the feed, meaning that it actually may be ignorant of a huge amount of blog content that’s not pushed in a feed. That produces some skewing, as I found with PubSub back in June.

Ideally, I’d like to see Google do what Technorati does and grab the actual full-text of the post, rather than depend just on the feed. For its part, Google says this is something it’s pondering.”

Also if you do a search like Library, above the top result shows some related blog home pages…whereas Technorati uses it’s new Blog Finder search, I wonder if Technorati would implement some suggestions from it’s Blog Finder search into the general search engine…just like it does with it’s Tag search…see here.

More from the SEW article:

“…it’s not a true full-text search across all sources… this is because some publishers only syndicate excerpts of content via RSS. Google’s blog search indexes all of the content it finds in feeds, but does not attempt to access and index the full content available on a publisher’s web server.”

Offers:

Relevance or Date ranking
RSS feed or an Atom feed
Limit by Title
Author
Date (choose this for most recent stuff)

Even though the standard operators work such as:

link:
site:
intitle:
inurl:

Check out the news ones:

inblogtitle:
inposttitle:
inpostauthor:
blogurl:

Wow, you can really hone in on a post.

Example

These are on the default sort of relevancy…whereas if I were to subscribe to be notified of recent entries I would sort by date (isn’t this what blogs are about, you’d think date sorting would be the default)

Trying to limit results just to my blog:

inpostauthor:johnt (333 hits)
Not unique enough as there are other authors with the name johnt

blogurl:libraryclips.blogsome.com (194 hits)
Every hit is from my blog, awesome!

allinblogtitle:library clips (194 hits)
Equally awesome! (as long as someone else doesn’t have the same words in their blog)

site:libraryclips.blogsome.com (o hits)
Doesn’t work.

link:libraryclips.blogsome.com
The link search doesn’t work very well compared to other engines, so many of my own URL’s are mixed in the results.

A refresher on keyword and link searching with RSS engines:
KeyWord Search Comparison Chart
PDF file of comparison of how Blog search work

All that’s missing is search by category…maybe that’s next!…why not, as people categorise their blog posts, I’m sure they could take a leaf out of Technorati’s book, IceRocket has joined in.

Also I’d like to see a citation link under every hit,

Check out the FAQ.

Haven’t consulted my RSS reader for a day, let’s see if there is already a bookmarklet.

This was meant to be a comment left at Bud Gibson’s blog, but I kept getting denied so why not blog about it…here is his post on his live newsmastering project.

This newsmastering portal is aggregating blog posts as well as del.icio.us bookmarks, with categories/tags intact…it’s the best I’ve seen yet!

Body

Each post shows full-text or excerpts depending on how the individual blog owner has set their native RSS feed…each post also has a Date-mark, Title (links to the native site), and Topic.

There is also a link to the native blog, a link to the permalink at the native blog, and a link called Archive (the permalink)

…you can save the post to your del.icio.us account, and also click the Technorati link to see who is talking about that post in the blogosphere.

Sidebar

- Searchbox
- Browse by month (as mentioned each post is archived under a month)
- RSS feed
- OPML
- List of all sources (links to their sites, and links to their feeds)

The best part is that not only is the post/bookmark content re-syndicated, but so is the blog category or del.icio.us tag
…this means that you can view or discover posts by category (these categories seem to be a total of the categories in everyones blogs and tags in everyones del.icio.us accounts).
The presentation of these categories/tags are in a tag cloud, with the great feature of 3 sorting views: Recent, Alpha, Freq (great for discovery).

So if you click on a tag/topic/category in the tag cloud you can see all posts from all sources assigned with this topic all within the portal…now that’s outstanding.

Missing

Each post is discoverable 3 ways:

- Homepage (until it drops off)
- Month
- Category

The main thing missing is a permalink for each post, as the title links to the native site…what about having an additional link that is a permalink for that post within the portal.
[ADDED: See comments section]
.
This way you can point to that post precisely to where it lives in the portal

….this is basically going beyond re-syndicating, and it would be truely re-publishing a blog post with a additional home (2 permalinks for the same post - one at the native site, and one in the portal)

…this would certainly require the authors content.

This included would make it a one-in-all powerful automated topic portal…this is Newsmastering at its best so far!

[ADDED: also missing is viewing all posts by one source….see comments section below]

[ADDED: also missing is comments and trackbacks for each permalink (Archive), this is a dicey issue…see comments section below]

Here is the comment I tried to leave on Bud’s blog.

I really enjoy reading your posts on newsmastering, you have great real life examples to demonstrate your ideas which makes it real, and not just talk.

Also I really think there is a market to offer users a system where they can use a free host to create a Branded Public RSS Aggregator
…Blogdigger Groups isn’t cutting it any more, we need a free host that lets you set up a Newsmastering aggregator with ease (with the presentation and functional capabilities of FeedWordPress [eg], or PlanetPlanet [eg]).

So with the re-mixing process:

…you are harvesting categories from blog posts, and tags from del.icio.us
…so the categories in your Public RSS Aggregator are a total of the categories in everyone’s blogs and del.icio.us accounts
…this does make the categories in your Newsmaster Aggregator a bit messy, as some people may use the category/tag “tech”, and others may use “technology”
(but I guess this reflects the community so it’s a good thing, perfection and neatness may water down the colour of the tag set)

…unless your community decides on a thesaurus or synonym ring…but I suppose this isn’t very free like what web 2.0 is suppose to be…I suppose there are supplements like TagCloud, or k-collector…of course the idea is automation (last resort is having a human screening every post and applying a category).

At the moment I feel with choosing the right feeds, and re-mixing feeds you can make quality RSS radars, having all this content in the Newsmaster aggregator is one thing, but categorising it for discovery is another.

Also how does reBlog fit into this process?

I notice you can’t leave comments, which is a good thing, as the owner would rather have the comments on their own blog.

Imagine if your blog was re-syndicated on several portals, your comments would be distributed all over the place, and you wouldn’t even know people are commenting if you aren’t aware of all the portals your blog is in.

As mentioned next to each post is a Technorati link to see who is talking about that post, what about having a comments link that shows you the comments from the native post

…so each source or RSS feed (listed on the sidebar) would contain the post, category, and comments for re-syndication.

See my posts for more:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/08/25/public-rss-aggregators-functionality-and-copyright/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/09/09/cms-news-public-rss-aggregator/
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/09/15/klog-news-public-rss-aggregator/

kLog News is a simple and clear Public RSS aggregator…great for keeping up with blogs in the KM industry via the one feed (these could be called expert feeds)…there is also an OPML, and more.

Body

Here you will see a running list of the latest posts, each has a permalink, the title is also a permalink

…this is different to other public aggregators as clicking on the title doesn’t take you to the native site.

Sidebar

Here is a list of the contributors (source blogs) that automatically - via re-syndication - populate the content for this portal.

When you click on one, eg. Community Engine, it will show posts just from this blog in the body.

The difference here is that the title does link to the native source.

Also there lacks an RSS feed to promote the source blog, in this example the Community Engine Blog.

The right-sidebar shows a quick title list of the latest posts, clicking on one will take you to the spot on the homepage.

Hang On!

Actually, when I examined the the posts in the homepage I didn’t notice that any of them were authored by any of the sources on the sidebar list…the posts on the home page seem to be by the administrator.

So this may be a Public RSS Aggregator, but the homepage doesn’t seem to aggregate posts from all sources in date order like a river of news (this is meant to be the best part…the RSS feed content is the same)

…so in fact the RSS feed isn’t a spliced feed of all the sources…hmmm

…it’s just an RSS feed for the administrators posts.

There is also a section at the top left called News…here there are more administrator channels, each with an RSS feed, they are Hot Sheet, kLog Watch, and Press Releases
…also listed is Yahoo! News - Technology News as re-syndicated content, but no promotion of their feed.

So in the end this basically has the same functionality as a Bloglines Public Aggregator.