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

Hoffbauer is a recent finding that is ripping off my content.
My whole post is there, but my author name is no where to be seen, at least the title links back to my post.

But there is no where on the blog that lists the sources it re-syndicates as the content for the blog, and it lacks an information page to tell you where the content is coming from and that the premise of the blog is authored by other blogs.

I don’t even know if I’m being re-syndicated or it’s just ripped me the old fashioned way.

Can’t they just use a tool like SuprGlu for this sort of thing…arghhh!

I don’t mind being re-syndicated if it is done the right way, the polite way.

A few posts ago I mentioned that Technorati has a tag cloud for your profile, clicking on a tag from here will list your posts within that tag…so the next step is to put a tag cloud on your blog.

This way people can browse your blog by tag…even though it takes them to a page outside your blog, who cares, it is good enough for now…only if Technorati would provide this code…anybody listening.

NOTE:If you bookmark your blog posts in del.icio.us and put the tagroll on your sidebar this is a similar idea, but now you can nearly do this with Technorati, so you need not bother bookmark your blog posts in del.icio.us for this reason (I guess bookmarking in del.icio.us gives your blog posts more exposure, but some consider this spamming, anyway there are ways to automatically bookmark your posts at time of posting - no effort at all).

Also a clever idea I found at Freshblog was the way you could choose a del.icio.us tag from a hacked drop down list on your sidebar and it would list posts within that tag at your blog instead of launching to del.icio.us, very clever (but I’d like to do this from the tagroll without using the hack drop down)…here’s another implementation.
I can’t see why this can’t be done if we are going to use the Technorati tag cloud in the future…the good thing about launching to the Technorati site is that you can further view items within a tag by all blogs.

Or what about just making internal tags (but how would you make a tag cloud from internal tags…see more.)

If you don’t use tags, Technorati still picks up your blog categories as tags, so you can have a tag cloud version of your categories…now you have two ways to browse categories, one within your blog, and one outside your blog (but the good thing about a tag cloud, as opposed to a list, is it gives context to your categories).

Anyway I failed to mention in the other post that at the end of every blog post we can now point to our user space at Technorati Tags…before hand at the end of a post we listed some tags that point to Technorati Tags or wherever you like, this is good to discover other like content, but you can’t see other like content just from your site…well now you can as our user name can be included in the URL.

Here’s the old way:
folksonomy

This is the code:
a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/folksonomy” rel=”tag”>folksonomy

NOTE: I haven’t included the opening and closing tags, as then my raw code disappears, is there an easier way to treat the HTML as normal text so I can publish the code.

Here’s the new way:
folksonomy

This is the code:
a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/folksonomy?user=johnt” rel=”tag”>folksonomy

Actually I don’t know if this new way works, but it would be good if it did…of course you could list both ways, but you really only need to list the new way, as when it launches to your user tag page on Technorati, you are one click away from “Search all blogs”.

Passing categories

Before I mentioned a post that hacked a category box into your blog that re-directed your del.icio.us tags to be viewed within your blog (this is crucial for Blogger users so people can browse their posts by category, as this is not a feature of Blogger).

If you read on there is also mention of passing categories between blogs, this is just amazing.
What happens is if you are viewing all posts on one blog within a category, you can then go to the blogroll of that blog and launch to another blog, and it won’t just go to the home page, it will go to the same category page as the blog that you were just on…great for discovery

…of course all blogs on the blogroll have to have the same category hack installed, and use the same categories, unless there is a way for the code to decide on the closest or most similar category via a synonym ring of some sort.

What an idea…so now you can not only view like posts from tags in the blogosphere (Technorati Tags), but you can also view like posts from tags in your blogroll or network.

Now this got me thinking, at the end of every blog post I could list my Technorati Tags, but also list my blogroll or network tags.

Here’s what the end of my blog post would look like (for Technorati I’m point to the general tag level, and not the user tag level for this example):

Technorati Tags: tagging, blogs, technorati

Network Tags: tagging, blogs, technorati

For the network tags I wouldn’t use the rel=”tag” part as they are being picked up by the Corante Web Hub anyway.

On my sidebar I could have my user tag cloud from Technorati, and my network tag cloud from the Corante Web Hub

…but it wouldn’t be like the tag cloud on the home page of the Corante Web Hub, it would only include the tags I use on my blog, the idea is that when you click on one you can see my posts within that tag, and other posts from the network that use that tag…so what Technorati does for the blogosphere, I would be doing at the network level.
I could also maybe use Technorati to do this…imagine if you could view Technorati Tags just according to the Corante Web Hub OPML file…then I could also use this tag cloud as well on my sidebar.

In this case at the end of my blog post I would list the Technorati Tags pointing to my user level tag, then the Technorati page could say “Search your OPML”, “Search all blogs”

…you could maybe change the “Search your OPML”, to “Search Corante Web Hub blogs”…and it would be good if you weren’t just limited to one, but be able to load as many OPML’s as you like.

This is more a wish than a prediction but I am betting that there will be one killer search engine for all the social bookmark services, someone to do for bookmarks what Technorati does for blogs.

So far we have a lot of meta-search tools:
Gada.be
GutenTag
Tag Central
Tagbert

Wink is the only tool that is merging the results but how are they ranked is the question.

What you’d think happens is that the item that has been bookmarked the most in all services with that tag will get top ranking and so on…I guess this is TagRank.
They could also mix in a Google link search and Technorati Link search to the tweak the ranking I guess, but the idea of just pure Tag Rank is good I suppose.

For each result set a link to the tag in all the services would be good, and as Wink already does, is listed related tags.
What about common tags for each item in the results from each service…this is extending the search to discovery…and/or common tags for the result set.

Since this is a human indexed web, what about being able to search full-text, the relevancy and ranking would be something similar to Google’s Page Rank with some of the TagRank thrown in

…the results would suggest looking in various tags, or see results in clusters.

This way we could have a human indexed web (less noise) that is searchable by full-text (relevancy/ranking a la PageRank and TagRank), or search via tag (relevancy/ranking according to TagRank)…like subject searching on an OPAC, as well as full-text searching.

So far the closest service has been Zniff, but this is just for the Spurl service…if all the services were combined this would be a powerful and cleaner search engine, that enables to limit search to a subject category.

Ohh, I forgot, there also has to be full-text search within a tag
…these refined results could again be based on a type of PageRank.

Speaking of refining, when you search for a tag, a list of intersecting tag could be available to refine your results, also boolean tag searching would be great…just check out Simpy for great searching features.

So who’s it gonna get into this risky game.

Imagine doing a link search on your blog domain to see which posts and how many times they have been bookmarked by the various services, and what tags people used to describe/file your various posts.

Here are some of my earlier posts:
What is the tagosphere?
Folksonomy: search vs. browse
Social bookmarks vs. free text search
Tagging alone is not a panacea for retrieval!

So the next time you search wouldn’t it be great to be able to choose the result set based on PageRank or TagRank.

[ADDED 22/02/06: rel8r]

Technorati have added new features…the search results now have a user link, clicking on this will take you to the users Technorati Profile, from here you can click on a tag from the tag cloud where you will see posts from one tag from the one blog.

I wonder if there is a way to limit a search in Technorati Tags to one blog (I mean it’s all there now)…IceRocket is on the game.

What about a link to the whole tag cloud…and some code for your sidebar…

Also, every item in the results page has 2 icons: one to see incoming links for the post, the other to refine the search to just that blog…I’ve got to say Technorati is looking super of late, and is super fast…good on ya guys!

Actually there’s more, depending on your search different labels appear in a tabbed format, so if you search for Gadgets, this of course is searching in all Blogs, but clicking on a tab will refine the search to blogs about: Technology, Apple, Tech, IPod, Hardware, Music…this is a great use for the Technorati Blog Finder data.

They are also handy widgets on the sidebar, one is keyword trends…DataMining has more.

Phil Bradley’s I want to guide has been extended, there is also a blog to keep up with the latest.

There are so many ways to make these type of lists: webpage, wiki, blog, bookmarks, outline…for me this seems like a type of classic link blog.

The quickest way would be to bookmark each resource in a social bookmark manager, add a comment, and have that RSS feed re-syndicated to a blog
…or even just be content with the bookmark manager as the portal, but I suppose the blog format is going to be more noticable.

Reminds me how Emily Chang posts.