Library clips

RSS Usability Options is yet another quick subscription service for your readers.

KickRSS is really giving Blogdigger groups a run for its money by not only remixing feeds but also presenting them as a river of news.

See recent articles from today, yesterday, week

…what about forever?
Does it dump items over 7 days old, I don’t think Blogdigger groups does this as it is a present and past portal.

You can also search your mix.

The labels are more clear than Blogdigger groups, well it is a label instead of the URL string…anyway the idea is that you can view items from once source (a check box would be good to choose from a selection of sources)

Something I’d like from these RSS digests is to organise the sources into folders, just like personal RSS readers, that way you could read a river of news at the folder level.

What I like about Blogdigger groups is that you can do search RSS feeds, even from a single feed.

As it grows hopefully they can list all the kickRSS mixes in a directory of some sort.

In all, kickRSS is a simplified but very effective newsmastering tool.

Basically what it has over Blogdigger groups is the easy to undertand interface and the presentation…I wonder if any customisation of the presentation is coming soon (make your own branded Public RSS aggregators, that’s what I’m after).

Check out the Library Stuff contribution…Steven also points out that it lacks an OPML file.

Feed Digest is always improving itself, I wonder if it will head into this direction, it’s inevitable once you’ve made some feeds that you can present them somewhere, this is a huge market.

Another alternative is to also offer a display similar to Fyuze’s pages of display boxes (like what you get on virtual desktops like Netvibes)

Rollyo now let you export a searchbox to your blog, I’ve placed one on my sidebar to search my blogroll.
At the moment when you click the drop down you only have a choice to search across my whole blogroll, if I have time I am considering also listing each blog separately…so you can search “all” or individually.

There is also a feature to add a search roll to your Firefox toolbar.

It would be great to import a batch of blogs into Rollyo via an OPML file, if possible…at the moment you can search my Bloglines account via Feedster (as it can search the OPML file).

Related post:
Swicki: mini search engine

In the wake of fresh blogosphere news portals like Memeorandum comes Blogniscient.

Thanks to the TechCrunch crew

I was doing some ego searching and came across a blog who has re-published my post as their own, what’s with that! Check out this post at mindblast, it’s my post, but there is no link to my blog, and the author is labelled as someone else.

Here is the original post which is from my blog, you will notice the 1st couple of paragraphs are missing as well as the last sentence.

Someone has also left a comment saying it’s a nice list and where did he get it from…well that’s just it isn’t it, you shouldn’t have to ask, as it should be linked back to the source, and on top of it not be claimed as your own…since it has a few bits missing the least would be to quote it from my post, and link back.

At first I thought it was a clipping type action where the post is re-published from an RSS reader and for some reason it wasn’t linking to the source, but what about the author’s name.
But then I noticed it wasn’t a software problem as some of the post has been deleted just leaving the listed items.

So you might say how did I find this post if I was ego searching (seeing who links to me) as I’ve mentioned one of the problems is they don’t link back to me, well the only reason I found this post is that I’m referencing one of my own posts at the end, so that’s how I found it.

This may be happening with other posts that people are claiming as their own, but how would you know, maybe a tool like Copyscape helps, but all it found was some of my posts in a Blogdigger search…also with Copyscape you have to manually check, it isn’t a magic scout that checks and alerts you when someone is ripping you off!

So this isn’t an RSS re-syndicating issue (which we accept), this is outright plagiarism!

PS: I can’t seem to find their email, and instead of leaving a comment on their blog, what better than to achieve the same thing by using trackback, and broadcasting at the same time.

Phil Bradley has a great chart on what you can do to manage and share information…another great guide from a while back is Which search engine when?

I really like the way these guides are designed from the users perspective, that is sorted by the questions a user would ask. I guess Phil gets asked a lot of reference type questions since he is on the CILIP Update Internet Q & A.

Sounds like Phil would do well using a tool like Squidoo, not only as a great place to present as an expert Lens, but also that you can subscribe to RSS feed for updates.

Yoono is real easy to use and a powerful system for your favourite bookmarks, although you have to download the program I’d like it to be online like Chipmarks (although Chipmarks isn’t quite as sophisticated).
But what I like about Chipmarks is that it is portable, and that’s what we at least want in a web 2.0 environment, stuff to be web-based and even integrated into your browser, etc…of course along with sharing and discovery which Yoono is all about.

So what does Yoono do, well firstly export your favourites into Yoono

When you are done managing your bookmarks (sorting, discovering, sharing, adding, deleting, etc…) you can sync them back to your PC.

Filter for:

- empty folders
- watch folders of others (based on the same theme as one of your folders)
- share a folder/s (publish) allow people to subscribe to updates
- see duplicate URL’s in your collection
- make folders private (Yoono will not record its contents)
- check dead links

Make new folders, and delete folders/items

When you add bookmarks, you are automatically alerted about similar sites

Send an email of a bookmark or a folder of bookmarks, or copy it to paste as HTML

Search folder and bookmark titles

Search all of Yoono (social search engine)..results also return subject experts based on the keyword

Click on a folder or a bookmark, and click “See Suggestions” to see a list of similar stuff, then add these to your favourites
Even type in a URL, and see suggestions, it returns similar sites, and experts (published folders from other users)

Click on an expert and view they folders they are sharing (publish), subscribe away.
Search for users - find an expert (folders they publish)

In the community tab check “My Subscriptions” and there live your subscriptions and your publications (folders you share)

Then there is “My News”, this is an RSS Reader

- view by day, folder, all feeds, unread feeds
- add a feed
- filter

You can also host a forum or community based around the subject of your published folders

So the alert functions are:

- subscribing to your favourite feeds (as it has an RSS Reader component)
- subscribe to similar URL’s added by other users based on the theme of one of your bookmarks or folder/s
- subscribe to others users folders
- alerted of dead links

There is also a toolbar or bookmarklet to access similar sites and experts related to the page you’re browsing

You can import OPML files

Coming soon, from the website:

“Create your own press review (available soon)
Create your very own press review by publishing an RSS feed containing your comments on web sites, selections of articles you have read in your news and comments you have associated with your bookmarks.”

Robin Good has the low down on Squidoo.

Squidoo is like creating your own topic page, similar to how a library creates Subject Information Guides or Pathfinders…or even like your own about.com…more from the Squidoo blog.

Here are some examples (there are also more at the end of the e-book mentioned below).

Here is an e-book explaining our search woes and how Squidoo relieves you from poking around the web.

As Seth explains a Lens (a topic you make make in Squidoo, well they don’t have to be topics they can be your own profile page, whatever) is different to a blog as it doesn’t hold content it points to content.

But it is as easy as a blog to set-up, without Squidoo it’s much harder to set up a webpage.

Seth points out what we truely do when we surf the web…we may be researching a product for example so we poke around looking for prices, reviews…how do we do this, we search Google with a search term and slug through the results, maybe something like Clusty is better as results are in clusters.

After a long time we compile all our research, make an analysis, and prepare to make a decision…but has the Google ranking helped us to find stuff about our product, what if there are hundreds of thousands of hits.

Anyway, as an alternative you can now go to Squidoo, type in your search term, and hopefully find a topic page for what you are after…why bother researching when someone has done all the ground work.

From the e-book in relation to using a search engine:

“You’re not seeking the answer at first - first you want to understand the meaning behind your choices”

“…the first version of the Web is still focused on poking. It will always be. It delivers matches, but it doesn’t deliver meaning”

Of course there are webpages out there that already do this, but how do we know which ones they are in our Google results, with Squidoo they are all in one spot…also the ease of creating these topic pages will increase the quantity made compared to what’s out there presently.

The only thing I can think so far that is similar to Squidoo is About.com, but then this isn’t collaborative, Squidoo is made by the people for the people…Wikipedia is a similar idea but these aren’t one stop topic pages, these are encyclopedia entries, they are restricted to this concept.

So we have gone from collecting and sharing links in del.icio.us to expanding that concept to a list of links in Wink, MemeFlow, and JetEye, to a topic hub page or Lens in Squidoo.

It seems looking at the sample Lens that you will be able to tag them, so maybe they will live in a type of folksonomy environment (related tags, related Lenses, Tag cloud, neighbourhood), give ratings (social ranking), subscribe to a Lens with RSS, and LensRoll a Lens.

Lenses will rank well in search engine results as they are considered authoritative, and the webpages they point to will rank higher because they are being pointed to by an authoritative source…so what happens when Lenses are pointing to each other, top ranking for everyone…see more on Hub and Authorities.

There is also ways to make money with a Lens…read the e-book is great stuff!

miniSearch searches the full-text of any URL via Yahoo!.

This is great news to search the full-text of your del.icio.us tags.

Here is one of my tags: del.icio.us / johnt / Blog_conver…there is a bookmark in this tag called Data Mining: Weblog Graphs: The Thread Problem…there is a word called “Reid” in this post.

So all I do is whack in that del.icio.us address into the first search box, choose Web Pages from the drop-down menu, and type in the term “Reid” into the 2nd search box…and there you have it!
FOR SOME REASON THIS DOESN’T WORK NOW!

Notice in the Yahoo! search string that it has done a URL search for every bookmark on that page by using the OR operator, and the URL: operator.

If you choose Web Sites from the drop-down menu, it will do a site search for every bookmark on your page using the OR operator and the site: operator, so obviously this may yield more results as you are searching the full-text of several sites at the same time, same as Rollyo.

Bu instead of searching a bunch of URL’s at the same time, like Rollyo, it is searching one URL that’s already pointing to a bunch of sites.

…read more.

Now you can apply this concept to your blog categories, but it seems to only work for me when they are bookmarked in del.icio.us.

You can use Blogdigger to search full-text within a category of your blog, minisearch can’t do this as far as I’ve tried below.

Here is the example in Blogdigger
(search term is “topix”, within the category “rss”, within the site “libraryclips.blogsome.com)

Let’s try this with minisearch…whack in your blog category URL, select a search term, and your done…I get 2500 hits (that’s too many), what about when I select Web Page from the drop-down, it doesn’t work.

What if your blog doesn’t have categories, well some people bookmark their blog posts with del.icio.us tags as a way to have blog categories. I already have blog categories but I bookmark them in del.icio.us so I can have a title index for my posts by category (although I’ve been lazy the last month or so).
So in effect the del.icio.us account I have for my blog is a mirror for my blog, but now I can search full-text within a category.

So let’s try this out with this del.icio.us tag, with the search term “Topix”…correct 4 hits, just like Blogdigger…what about if we choose Web Pages from the Drop down menu…doesn’t work.

So to recap, if you don’t have blog categories, save all your posts in a del.icio.us account under various tags.
del.icio.us is good to browse posts filed in tags, but what if you can’t find what you are looking for just from browsing the title of your posts, even though you know what tag the post is in.
Sounds like you need to be able to search full-text of all the bookmarks saved under that tag, well in comes minisearch, the full-text engine for your del.icio.us account, or even for your blog if you use a del.icio.us account as a mirror for your blog.

Export the search box on your site.

Welcome to Blummy!

Keep all your bookmarkets in one bookmarlet, when you click your Blummy bookmarklet it will show a box with all the bookmarklets you have collected, choose one of these to activate a bookmarklet.

Create your own Blummets (bookmarklets)
(there is a form to create/enter a bookmarklet)

Select All Blummets, Your own, or Most Popular

You can also search for a Blummets

When you find one you like you can even see the code.

So the idea is that when you find a Blummlet, you drag it to the empty box on the left (called Blummy)
When you drag the del.icio.us blummet it will prompt you to enter your del.icio.us user name.

Now that you have several Blummlets in your Blummy (gee, the sounds odd), drag the Blummy bookmarklet to your toolbar.

So the idea is that when you are on a web page just click the Blummy bookmarklet and your Blummy box comes up with a choice of bookmarklets, choose the one you need.

It would be good if you could choose 2 bookmarlets at once.

This is a great idea, a place to keep all my bookmarklets to use on any computer, also relieves some space on my very heavy Links bar.

Now why not add a folksonomy discovery element to this, discover bookmarklets by tag, user, etc…I’d love to see a folksonomy just for bookmarklets (Blummy is a prime candidate as it already does other cool stuff!)