Library clips

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/