Library clips

Inform is a very sophisticated News Portal that focuses on discovery of related content…you can also personalise the news to your perspective, and view the latest from within your own inbuilt RSS reader or grab the feed to read in your own personal RSS reader.

Front page

Front page lists top stories by category, click to see a full page for each category, or you can choose a category on the category bar, these also have sub-categories.

Channel Directory

There is a tab to see a directory for all categories called Top Channels, the difference is that when you choose from this list it launches a 2 boxes: Related Content, and a Discovery Path.

Here you can see Related Content to a topic you have chosen, and sort it by relevance, and limit it to news, blogs, audio, video…clicking on an article will open it in the other box.

Discovery Path

In the Discovery Path it lists all the subjects from the stories that appear in the related content, these are grouped into 6 headings: Topics, Peoples, Industries, Places, Products, Organisations.
You can add a subject to your discovery path to narrow your browsing, or start a new Discovery Path with one click.

Since there is no back browser button, they have supplied a Discovery History (very handy).

There is also a feed for the page you are on, also offering a re-syndication widget for your blog sidebar.

My Channels

Lastly you can create your own Channel, type in a search word, it will suggest subjects that are close to this keyword, choose as many as you want, keep doing searches to add more suggested subjects…so this is the ability to mesh multiple subjects into the one channel…also generates a spliced subject feed (basically a feed for the channel you have created).

This isn’t a search feed, it is just viewing results by suggested subjects by the system…so the only convenience besides meshing subjects, is that you just go to your My Channels area and view your channels instead of looking for the subject term/s in the directory everytime…again you can sort by relevance or news source (news, blogs, video, audio), and now also by date…it’s a personal feed reader.

Related Articles and Flagging Articles

Each article can be flagged which lives in the flagged area (see the tab), and each story has a link to related stories, or an icon that does the same thing, clicking on this opens up a sidebar with excerpts of all the related stories…this is similar to related content for a topic, only this is at the article level.

Again you will see subjects from related stories to the one you are viewing, and when you click on an article it opens in the adjacent box where the subjects were listed (the subjects have now moved to a bar above the article)

Top Sources

Add a source to your area, this is like a personal feed reader (sort by date, flag stories)…you can also launch a discovery path from here.

So there seems to be 2 sorts of personal feed readers, one for Subjects, one for Sources.

OPML Renderer is a new plugin to place your OPML blogroll on your blog sidebar (pity I have to ask my blog host to add plug-ins, pretty please).

I’ve mentioned the incantations of this tool here, and here.

Talk Digger has revamped its service, and what a great job…I was about to go to Feed Digest and make a spliced ego feed from the various blog engines, where I could wipe the duplicates, but now I can do this at Talk Digger as this is its speciality…generate them in one easy go, and see the results, plus you can exclude links from your own domain…wow!

Here is the prime directive of Talk Digger:

“It is simple. You have in hand the URL of a piece of news of the BBC, a blog post, a product page, or any other web page, and you want to know who is talking about it, you want to know what people have to say about it. You copy that URL, paste it in the Talk Digger search box and press Dig it!

Talk Digger will then return results from various search engines. All the results returned contain a link to the URL. This is what we call a conversation: a multitude of people, all over the Internet, linking to a specific URL. The following schema describe what a conversation found by Talk Digger is. “

Features:

- You can choose to include up to 9 search engines, 6 of these are blog engines (BlogPulse is missing)

- Results are sorted by engine (10-20 results per engine)

- PageRank for each result (see if the site linking to you is popular)

- Sort by recent entries or PageRank

- Each result can be opened in a new window or previewed right where you are, and total incoming links for your whole blog from that search engine is shown

- Not only can you remove duplicates, you can exclude results from your own domain…now this is awesome (I think Feedster is the only engine that excludes results from a URL…only it is not combined with the link search)
I really think this is a winning feature.

So at last a way you can generate an RSS feed from Bloglines citations

My other option was to make an ego feed at MySyndicaat, but it doesn’t do link searches, you could maybe exclude results from your own domain with the boolean function, and it does away with duplicates…so it seems Talk Digger is a focused tool that provides a unique service.

[ADDED 30/12/05: What I mean is that MySyndicaat doesn’t do link searches internally from its Content Type menu, obviously you can do a link search (ego search) at the native engine and paste the feed address into MySyndicaat…maybe they can offer link search in the Advanced boolean section].

Get Started!

Here’s where to get a handy bookmarklet for an instant meta-popularity view…and keyboard navigation…implement it on your blog posts.

I wonder if you could say I only want to see incoming links from websites that have a PageRank of 5 or above, I suppose if you sort by PageRank you can just stop reading once it starts dropping.

See Fredericks post, very keen interest in blog conversations.

Related post:

Blog/RSS engines: Incoming links comparison
(Next I wonder if we can skip results in blogrolls, and results in blog posts that are re-published del.icio.us links)

(What about to limit incoming links from an OPML file, instead of the whole blogosphere)

More interesting stuff:

Weblog Conversations…more
A Model for Weblog Research…more
What is a Topic?…more

Improbulus beat me to it, Google lessons for librarians, we can all learn from each other…first lesson is on crawling and indexing…from the article:

“PageRank evaluates two things: how many links there are to a web page from other pages, and the quality of the linking sites […] if a document contains the words…right next to each other…in the title…appear several times […] more trusted websites have chosen to link to…”

There is an exercise included where you can pretend to be a search engine…I wonder if we would of done this in library school.

See another article on ranking…hub and authority.

Mysyndicaat is the best newsmastering workbench yet, it does all the processing extremely well (as well as finding feeds), and also presents your newsmastering efforts on your own page…see Robin’s interview with Giovanni Guardalben, creator of MySyndicaat.

Up until now Feed Digest seemed to be the best tool, and it still does have some prevailing features (a new release is due soon, awaiting to see the new features), and does seem to have a strong usage base…but MySyndicaat takes it a step further for the serious newsmaster.

Here are a few features:

OPML import/export
Reading lists
Filtering
Inbuilt search feeds
De-duping
Create multiple spliced feeds in the same account
Each spliced feed has a public “View” page

Very simple to use

Every spliced feed you make is called a “FeedBot”, you can make as many as you like.

Simply give your FeedBot a name, choose private/public, and also choose the refresh interval
(polling frequency for updates)

Next give your FeedBot a description

Then start adding your feeds into the address box, or even just a HTML content address as it will scrape sites…this is a handy feature.

Similar to BlogBridge, you can actually generate search feeds without even leaving the application, choose from Web engines, Blog engines, Tag engines, Feed finders, News engines, Reference, Consumer….

Now if you already have your feeds pre-prepared you can load in an OPML file…well done!

Before you press OK, you can then choose from the Advanced module.

Here you can use full boolean searching to filter your feeds…every feed in your spliced feed (FeedBot) can be filtered.
This is the essence of newsmastering, so I’m glad to see this sorely needed feature, as the whole idea is to search and filter for only news you want to see, the more granular, the better.

More advanced Options:

- disable a feed from your FeedBot
- convert post content from HTML to text
- include copyright notices
- clear posts from a day upto a year

…also, like Feed Digest duplicates are removed, this is a must.

Once you are all done you can see your list of all your FeedBots, where you can:

- edit
- remove
- view
- subscribe to the FeedBot XML icon (your spliced feed)
- P or A denotes public or authenticated
- there is also a tally numbering how many FeedBots you have created

You can export an OPML of all your FeedBots, if you have 5 FeedBots this means that if someone loads this OPML file into their RSS reader they will have 5 new subscriptions (each a spliced feed, created from merging many feeds).

And there’s more…you can choose to subscribe to the Reading List version of your OPML, this means that someone can subcribe to the URL of the OPML file, loading the feeds into your RSS reader just the same, only if the host deletes or adds a FeedBot this will automatically reflect in your RSS reader (feeds will magically be added or deleted from your RSS reader)…see more on Reading Lists.

So thats that’s the processing side of things, and you can’t really fault it, Giovanni has made an exceptional tool, he also provides a interface to present the results for a FeedBot.

View

Top of the page has the user name and the name of your FeedBot, it also promotes the XML icon to subscribe to this FeedBot.

The results are 10 per page

Each item in the results of course links to the native post

Each item has the source name from where the post came
(this is what you named one of the feeds within your FeedBot…it also has a link to the feed of this source)

At the most the presentation of a FeedBot looks a little like search engine results rather than a customised news page, although you can integrate Mysyndicaat into your website as Corante Hubs have done.

According to presentation, the current competitors are: SuprGlu, Blogdiggger Groups, and kickRSS, and also BozPages.

So for me the processing and management couldn’t be much better, but customising the results page could induce many more people to use this tool, that’s why I think SuprGlu has done so well.

SuprGlu doesn’t have extreme processing of feeds like MySyndicaat, but the results page looks like a blog or your own individualised web page, the less generic the more people are excited about making it their own
…I like that SuprGlu lists all the source’s on the sidebar, aggregates tags, and enables customisation of the CSS.

The good thing with MySyndicaat is that you can make as many FeedBots as you like, each with their own “View” page…whereas with the others you have to create an new account.

Some questions/suggestions

Can you filter across your whole FeedBot instead of repeatedly doing it for each feed…this is handy in cases where you want to filter each feed in your FeedBot exactly the same?

I know you can make an OPML file of all your FeedBots, what about an OPML file for each FeedBot?

Where is the RSS to HTML so I can make my spliced feed into HTML content which will automatically populate a website or blog?
(This would be handy since the results page lacks the customisation some might prefer… I guess you could just whack a FeedBot into SuprGlu and your done)

Where is the RSS to Javascript so I can re-syndicate the content into the sidebar of my blog?
(Having this inbuilt just adds to the tool kit)

One thing I noticed is Blogdigger Groups has multiple address boxes to enter feeds, no big deal really.

Two other things Blogdigger Groups does well is that it generates search feeds, and you can filter your view to just one source (also make a search feed on the fly from just one source)…kickRSS seems to also have both these features.

If MySyndicaat can’t do this on the fly maybe it can be a choice in the Content Type when adding a subscription, that is, you can generate a search feed from one of your pre-existing FeedBots, or from all of them…although, this doesn’t help users making their own on the fly.

Different view like Bozpages, eg. several widget feed boxes on one page

Sort by popularity

Sort by various date ranges

Related links for each post

Incoming links for each post

Threading for each post, that is connecting posts only from sources within the FeedBot, that link to each other

Recap of good presentation features

- source list on the sidebar
- filter content to just one source
- aggregate tags
- generate search feeds (all or one feed)
- widget feed boxes (several one one page…multiple pages, one for each FeedBot)
- Sort by popularity/date
- Links: related, incoming, threaded

What I want the most is the option to view several spliced feeds within the same portal…this basically means having all your FeedBots as a folder list on the sidebar…a kind of Master FeedBot View:

- view a river of news from all your FeedBots
- view a river of news from one FeedBot
- view content from one source in a FeedBot

…just like a personal RSS reader (this is a unique feature of a Public Bloglines account)

For an example of this see newstation (scroll down to read about it in this post)…with this implementation each FeedBot could be a Topic or Subject, within each topic folder lives all the source feeds.
This is what I mean by presenting all your FeedBots on one page, you could make a professional news page without being a techie…if I can present my newsmastering efforts to look something like newstation, then I believe we have come a long, long way in the read/write web.

Future

Right now people can subscribe to your FeedBots in a personal RSS reader, or re-syndicate the content, or just go to your FeedBot page every day to see the latest.

What if they could login, to your FeedBot page (or Master FeedBot page) and use it as a kind of fixed personal RSS reader..ie. they can’t add or delete feeds, it’s just read-only, the difference to bookmarking it for daily view, is that if you login in you can keep track of the posts you have or haven’t read, also save posts into folders…so a very light weight reader built in (Wink applications have this user idea in mind).

At this stage your newsmastering portal would be presented as your own customised news website with the content according to the source feeds you have based it on, people can also read the content in their RSS reader…so this would be similar to making a News engine like Memeorandum…or even more similar to the look of a news site like newstation, with the similar feature of making your own personal or refined version…by registering and choosing your own feeds, or making search feeds, and filing these into folders, then logging in to read, track, and save stories.

Hang on, Svartling’s Newspage project is exactly this, (just like many FeedBot’s or a master FeedBot View, but customised), and then allows you to register to create your own version of NewsPage, by allowing you to choose from the selection of source feeds, or even make search feeds, keep track of them, and save them in your own fixed RSS reader.

Stages

I guess I’m taking the newsmastering concept to a professional level, but with non-techie know-how.

- finding feeds
- processing feeds
- presenting feeds
- user personalisation