Library clips

Google Reader is Google’s foray into the heavy weight RSS reader market.
Looks great, has some good functionality, but not good enough for my liking, although if it changed 3 or 4 features it would be a good competitor in the advanced RSS reader market.

Search for blogs

You can search for blogs, and easy subscribe and label the feed from the search screen.
Although this isn’t a directory, so you see individual posts, not just homepages, even if you do click on a result of a blog post it must subscribe you to that blog’s main feed.

Filter (this is when your subscription list gets too long to scroll through, it also works for the labels)

Reading preferences

First are the choices:

- Your subscriptions
- Read items
- Starred

“Your subscriptions” can be read as a river of news (whole account [”all” label] or by label - just like Rojo), or read as usual by per feed (sorted by date or relevance).
What is relevance, rather it should be a personalisation mechanism, ie. what is relevant to my reading behaviour just like Google personalised search… actually the FAQ says:
“prioritizes the items that seem most relevant to you”

It has the 3 pane approach:

- List of feeds
- Title list
- View an item

Bloglines doesn’t have this, once you click on a feed, you scroll all the items, you don’t get a quick title view first, before deciding to click on an item to read.
Also Bloglines decides that if you have clicked on a feed you have read all items, unless you click “mark all as new” or you can also mark a single item unread as “keep new”.

Whereas Google Reader doesn’t consider a feed read at all, you have to click on an item title (up or down) to be considered read, if you don’t do this then it stays new…they also have a “keep unread” check box for single items (this is if you have read an item, but still want to keep it unread).

In comparison in Rojo you have to click on the “mark as read” icon to mark a whole page of items as read, otherwise they stay unread.

Title pane

Click up/down to see next title of an item, you can even page up/down if there are heaps of items

- Sort by relevance/date

- Show read items: hidden/visible

So it keeps the items you have read by “read”, this means you have clicked on an item from the title index pane to see the whole item.
To see “read” items you can click at the top, or you can see “read” items per feed by clicking on “visible” in the Title pane.

Bloglines keeps all items - see last session…24 hours…All items

Rojo have a toggle to “Show Read & Unread” or “Show Unread Only”

- Star an item

(These are also kept in a seperate section, similar to Rojo)

Also sort feeds by date added, or by name, exporting, importing, unsubcribe, edit label, filter (search within a feed).

Item pane

- Link to native site

- Gmail this

(Bloglines lets anyone email a link via a box)

- Blog this (Blogger)

- Unsubscribe

- Author labels are listed on the bottom (blog categories)

- Your labels (tag thems like in Gmail)

Problems

- Where is the bulk managing of feeds?

- Where can you browse your saved items that are labelled?

If I am on an item that I have labelled “blog”, I click on this and it will show “All Items Labelled Blog”, but how do I do this the other way around, where is my item tag set or item tag cloud…where I my items I have saved, not flagged, but saved with a label.

- Where is Search within a feed, search within a folder, search your whole account

- Biggest problem is you can’t mark all new items as read in one click.

I don’t get it, so if you don’t click on a item title then it isn’t considered “read” and it won’t go unbold, this means I have to click every item title so it leaves, why can’t there be a “mark all items as read” like Rojo.

Reason being is that in one view I can see the titles of the latest posts (even use page up/down to see them all), now I might not want to click on any of these to read as I know I’m not interested by looking at the title. The problem is that I have to read (click down) on each item otherwise it will stay new…this is ludicrous.

- Solution Watch tends to agree that it needs a “mark all items as read”, he also mentions a scroll bar would be a good option, I agree.

- He also mentions to be able to read a feed with one click, and scroll through the items, ie. forgoing the title pane…I agree there should be a two pane choice.

Even better just get rid of the Title pane altogether and offer the collapse/expand mode that Rojo does so well, I’m not talking setting in the options like Bloglines, but doing at will with one click from the page you are on.

Some bookmarklets

Community Engine seems to like the Google Portal much better, but then again this is a virtual desktop, and you can only see feed content in a display box, whereas Google Reader is a focused RSS Manager like Bloglines.

Consuming experience has an informative review but points out the bugs, which is why I’ve taken a while to get round to this review.

An online calendar, that is private/public…RSS feeds for the latest entries.

Implement it on your blog, just like RSS calendar.

From the website:

“Planzo is also one of the Internet’s first social calendar sites, allowing friends to stay connected through its network of users. Add users to your Favorites list to begin sharing events with them and easily surf to their calendar. Leave comments on your friends’ events and mark up their personal wall.”

More:

“Figure out when to plan events. You can see what your friends are up to on one calendar

Share photos, files, bookmarks and text snippets with our Notebook feature

Make a To-Do list for yourself with our To-Do list feature”

Have a go on the demo calendar.

Check out what GW Bush agenda.

Time Tracker is a simple to do list with a clock.

First there was Rollyo, now you can make a mini-search engine with Eurekster Swicki.

How it’s different:

- export search box on your blog with some direct links to popular user keywords or keywords of your choosing
- exclude results from sites
- sponsor your results
- weight searches based on the behavior of those who come to your site

I can’t seem to sign up (asks for a Beta code), anyway from what I see there is a Swicki Directory, not quite the power of the Rollyo folksonomy.

See the great write up at Solution Watch.

Also see the Swicki FAQ.

Check out Solution Watch for some great write ups on the new social web2.0 browser, Flock.

Not only multiple tabs, but draggable tags

Most Frequently Visited / Most Recently Added websites

History search

See Flickr photos in a bar just under the browser

Blog Editor (drag and drop stuff, and post to your blog)

Favourites Manager integration with del.icio.us

Shelf - seems like a place to keep notes, text, images, etc…

Feed Discovery

Inline feed viewer

…see more.

The Wiki and the Blog is an award winning essay on how information sharing, and collaborative tools allow us to dynamically adapt to a changing environment (from an intelligence agency point of view).

The idea is based on a workflow:

- repository
- blog
- wiki
- search (self explanatory)
- feedback

I also think RSS could of had a mention in respect to alerts and notification.

As the repository fills with information (structured or unstructured), we can be alerted by RSS for items within a category, user, keyword, most recent, etc…

Then we post blog entries, adding value (ideas and context) to this information (kind of a KM transference), people read the blog posts and are informed, create discussion (they too are notified of blog content by RSS).

The cream of the blogosphere is then added to a Wiki as the important and relevant information (filtered, and applied to the corporate context)…new entries can also have RSS feeds.

From the essay:

“The Blog will be vibrant, and make sea changes in real-time. The Wiki, as it matures, will serve as corporate knowledge and will not be as fickle as a the Blog. The Wiki will be authortative in nature, while the Blog will be highly agile. The Blog is personal and opinionated. The Wiki is agreed-uopn and corporate […] The Blog and the Wiki serve as successive refining processes for the unrefined ore in the intelligence repository.”

…this really reminds me of the Stock and Flow concept from a while back.

The repository is like the web, a flow of information, we monitor this and blog about it, inducing conversation, and establish a relevant context for this information….then we can publish our findings in a wiki (somewhere to distill all the context work done via blogging…the act of blogging is turning the information into usable knowledge).

By taking part in the blogosphere I think we are all knowledge workers without explicitly realising
…we monitor, distill (publish ideas in reaction to content, discuss, manifest new ideas, create personal relevance and context), then the final step is to refine all this by publishing the best practices in a wiki.

Feedback makes this full-circle, we can derive what is important to people from what they read and discuss, so this is measuring not the content, but the behaviours of people that deal with the information, this leads to foresight and direction.

From the essay:

“…in the repository were most cited by the Blog over the last 24 hours. This feedback lets visitors quickly know what the community thinks is important…understand its impact…let visitors know what areas of the Wiki are changing most rapidly as an indicator of newly vetted knowledge […] top words…top blog postings…top sources cited.”

” As important as information sharing is to the success of the solution, it is even more important to know who is sharing what information. This allows intelligence officers to accurately understand where they are in the intellectual space of the intelligence community. It also allows intelligence officers to see what gaps exist and where changes need to be made.”

I was thinking of how sharing information, or connecting information adds value, it’s up to you to see it and derive some possible value (different ways of connecting information may induce different types of value).

Usually corporate blogs can be hosted in a multi-blog platform, this way you can see recent posts and comments from all blogs (the co-operations mini blogosphere), if the blogs are hosted separately a similar thing can be done by newsmastering techniques in re-syndicating the blog content via RSS and presenting it in Public RSS Aggregator.

What about if you went a step further and connected all these blogs in a folksonomy, there are more connections available, thus a chance to add more value.
That is you could view new entries by cumulative category (kind of like the latest by tag)…or maybe the blogs could use tags instead of categories, so you could view content of the mini blogosphere by a tag cloud, whereas before it was just viewing the latest aggregate entries, now you could do this at an extra filtered level…also this extra filter denotes feedback on not just content but how it is defined, so if a certain tag has lots of new stuff, or appears “big” in the tag cloud we can realise it’s importance.

Actually you don’t need a folksonomy to do this, there are other ways to transport blog tags/categories…see Community Engine Re-mix Experiment.
…at the same token folksonomies are a great way to navigate the content of all blogs, as if it were one big blog
eg. other blogs that also use this category.

Machine generated tag clouds (such as TagCloud) are also beneficial, although repetitve keyword count can probably be identified by back-end technologies, but when viewed visually in a tag cloud it gives a great perspective.

Coming back to the essay, is there a step between the blog and the wiki, what is the workbench where you collect all the blog posts in order to publish in the wiki…can social bookmark folksonomies be the go-between.
This way instead of the authority deriving what they think are valuable blog posts from the blogosphere, they could also derive valuable blog posts from what others think.
Derive value from a community; how many times a post is bookmarked (popular), related posts, common tags for a post, related tags for a given tag, users who also bookmarked a post (this gives further context to information, and also more feedback on what people collectively think about information by their bookmarking behaviours).

[via Portal and KM]