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FreshBlog has the scoop on making a comments feed for blogs that don’t have one.

When you are notified of a comment from your blog on your email (firstly, set your email client to auto-forward the mail to an email to RSS service)…now all comments to your blog will be forwarded and converted into RSS, what brilliance, it was there for the taking!

Jookster is having a go at being the human indexed web, a la Zniff, Furl, Wink…

All you do is join up and add a Jookster bookmarklet, when you come across a site you like just Jook This!..this takes one click and you’re done, there is also a Share This! bookmarklet where you can email someone the page you are currently on. There is also a toolbar.

So what benefit do you get out of doing this, well when you search Jook, the search results are returned at different levels, you can even choose the degree’s of results.

From the website:

“0 degrees generates search results that will only return information that was jooked by you.

If you want to generate results from all Jookster members when searching, choose the highest degree which is 6. “

It also returns results for the whole web, not sure which search engine this is based on.

It’s kind of similar to searching on Furl, you see results from your archive, from the whole Furl archive, then from the whole web…all that’s missing is a group archive, and groups related to your group.

As you can tell you can form networks, sounds very similar to the old school Eurekster.

Not sure if this is going to take off when you already have this type of thing as a by-product of the folksonomies that cache pages…there’s more value to the users when you offer them a folksonomy, I feel this is going back to the old days, people are more inclined to participate if they offer a bit more user action…I do like the idea of degrees of results.

[via TechCrunch]

What if you could see the results or read the OPML file of your RSS reader in a blog engine.

You can almost do this in Feedster, as you can limit your search to just an OPML file, but you can’t do a blank search (we want to see all our entries like we do in an RSS reader).

But then what is the use of this, when we can just use an RSS reader?

Well if you could do a blank search of your RSS reader OPML file on a blog engine, and you sorted the results by date and subscribed to this RSS feed, that would just be like a spliced feed for your whole RSS reader, Rojo already offers one.

But what about if you sorted the results by authority, then this RSS feed would be a river of news, from all the feeds in your RSS reader, sorted by items that are most talked about…this is ranking the items delivered to you in your RSS reader by most popular items according to the blogosphere.

This is just ranking, it just floats popular items to the top, maybe you only care about only some items in each feed, so ranking by popularity according to the blogosphere, may bring relevant stuff to the top, and the items you hopefully don’t care about will sink to the bottom where you may never get to (this assumes you can read your items as a river of news).

What about those posts that are great but no-one knows about them, these will be at the bottom, as this item gains incoming links maybe it will climb your RSS readers ladder till you notice it, otherwise it will stay at the bottom…it’s a pity everything is about popularity..see my posts on other aspects to ranking, besides just incoming links.

If OPMLsampler generated an RSS feed, this could be possible.

But then again what’s popular to the blogosphere may not be popular to you, that’s when we get into personalisation and attention, many RSS readers rank your feeds and items according to your reading behaviour, items you click, items you flag, even maybe explicit voting…this way items in your reader are not ranked by incoming links but ranked on your past behaviour (implicit) and explicit interest (voting or rating)…Pito is suggesting to formalise this type of data so it can be shared across platforms. More to this, an OPML file from your RSS reader can maybe be used, in the future, as data for other applications other than RSS readers, such as recommendation engines based on your interests…this is attention data, Alex keeps pushing this further everyday.
(SIDENOTE: Alex’s post is a transcribed podcast, via a new tool called Transcibr)

Either way, ranking items in your RSS reader by authority in the blogosphere or by your personal statistics is another way to read your subscriptions instead of latest entries as they happen.

Actually ranking items in your RSS reader according by popularity in the blogosphere would be close to your own personal Memeorandum, the next step would be to thread items that link to each other, and also list related items about the same content underneath.

Jack celebrates how SharpReader threads items, which is like the incoming links scenario, only that items that are heavily threaded aren’t ranked higher (this actually links posts in your RSS Reader that have common links).

Then what about related items, these are items that are similar, probably based on text analysis, any RSS readers out there?…can you incorporate Waypath related into your RSS reader?

Stowe is going beyond ranking and threading and feels RSS readers don’t collate enough stuff around a post, when he sees a link, he wants to know stuff about it, by:

“I might click on tags embedded in the post, that take me to Technorati, or I might simply decide to search at Technorati or Del.icio.us for references to the piece or for tags to the topic or the names of individuals writing about it.

I might write a post, summarizing what I have uncovered, and offering some thoughts on the subject”

I like this idea, what if every link had a synposis of where to look for more information, or even went scouting and collated it for you…some blog posts do offer a lot of utilities for more information related to the post, but if a browser offered this then we have the controls at our fingertips.
Actually if I collated all my information bookmarklets and placed them in blummy, I could do things with the current page I’m looking at, example: blog engine backlinks (conversation tree or graph), blog engine search, blog tag engine links, blog engine related links, blog tag engine related tags, social bookmark backlinks, social bookmark search, social bookmark tags, social bookmark related links or tags, dictionary look up, etc…this would be better, as my bookmarklets are scattered, having my information bookmarklets in one place would be a good idea.

Instead of clicking on all these bookmarklets, what if this was all done for you on the fly, you just click a button called “Collate Info” and it did what all these bookmarklets would do, and presented the results in a web page
…all the ground work would be done by your little agent, you could just read the results, and delve further if you wish.

You can import the OPML file of someone elses outline and integrate it into yours (or even take bits and pieces), but all you have done is integrate it, now this outline has become part of your outline and comes under your OPML file…if this other outline changes it will not reflect in your outline, as it is static.

But it seems that some outlines (OPML files) can incorporate another outline (OPML file), and at the same time it subscribes to this OPML file from within your own OPML file…so changes to the outline you have subscribed to will show up on your outline, as it is dynamic.
I don’t know if subscribe is the word as it is not RSS, in that it notifies you of new additions, it actually just reflects the changes, this sounds more like SSE.

At the end of his post, James Moore describes this, actually Dave Winer incorporated James’s OPML file into his outline, anyway here is an exerpt:
“Dave kindly put TopTenSources and its OPML on his directory roll […] and when we changed our OPML, it was in turn updated on Dave’s site. All this was accomplished without any direct communication this morning with Dave.”

These dynamics of OPML are now leading to people incorporating heaps of other OPML files into their own, making directories of directories, James’s post also compares this to a decentralised version of what Yahoo! directory was doing in the early days, but now in web2.0 fashion, the users are the editors, and when aggregated we make a hell of a directory.
The other great thing is that when you have someone else’s OPML file in your outline, it is dynamic and changes (additions or deletions) are reflected, so that section of your outline is never stale, unless the person who own’s that OPML file (that section of your outline) has abandoned it.

We can make directory headings to hold all these OPML files, and if you click on each entry maybe an ajax box can pop-up listing other OPML files also listed in this directory (listed maybe under another heading) that are incorporated in this entry (OPML file)…maybe a taxonomy type structure is old fashioned, a folksonomy could be the go, tagging OPML files

…this could get crazy, as a tag holding all these OPML files could be an OPML file itself.

You can always search OPML files with OPMLsearch, and also by category (if some has applied a subject term to the OPML file)

Alex Barnett has some input in the discussion.

In a previous post I spoke about publishing from your outliner to your blog (the outliner would be a back up to your content), I also mentioned you could also make another outline by cutting ‘n pasting or drag and droppping these items from this first outline and organising them into categories into another outline, this way you can have an outline of your blog by category (there are also endeavours to place this on the sidebar of your blog as a category index tree).

Actually I was just thinking instead of cut ‘n pasting from one outline to another, what if you made an outline of the RSS feeds from each of your blog categories, this is an OPML file where all the items are RSS category feeds from the same blog, and as you post on your blog, the titles (links) of the posts magically appear under each feed as they happen, is this possible?
Does this mean your outline would poll these feeds and list the fresh posts under each link, but an outline can’t act like an RSS reader can it?

Back to the first bit, instead of publishing from your outline to your blog…since your outline has a folder for the date, then the second level is the title of the post, then the third level is the actual post, it pretty much is a stripped down version of your blog (not as pretty), so why not have this as a blog, as it has a URL.
People can go to your outline to see your latest posts, but can an outline have an RSS feed, so people don’t need to visit the outline daily?

If you chose your outline to not be organised by date, but by category could you also have an RSS feed for each folder in your outline, just like you can have an RSS feed for each category in a blog.

Anyway, using an outline as a blog is something new, but what about if you just use an outline as a list, in a previous post I asked, as I repeated above, can an outline have a feed, maybe it depends if the outline is rendered in HTML, that is, instead of folders, you keep hyperlinking to pages.

Here’s an tree based outline (could this have a feed, what about for each folder??)

Here’s a hyperlinked outline (every page could have a feed, this would be like every folder having a feed, but then how could you have a feed for the whole thing?)

Anyway I’d like to make several outlines (tree of folders or a hyperlinked) containing links and texts to various stuff, I’m seeking a feed for these outline lists…then I could also keep all these outlines in one big outline, from my post:
“…an OPML outline being great to make lists, but I want people to be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for a list, so they can keep up to date with new additions to the list…simply put, if I make a shopping list in an outline, and add a new item in my shopping list, how can someone be notified of this, is there a way for an outline to have an RSS feed?
This would only work if you added a new item to your outline, what would happen if you made changes, or restructured your outline?
Maybe RSS could notify you that a change has happened, but you would need to go to see the new version and compare it to the older version to see exactly what those changes are.”

An earlier post of mine explains my request.