Library clips

After lots of playing around I think I’ve worked out what the Top 10 Sources site is…it’s a blog directory with lots of Public RSS Aggregators, you could also call it a reading list directory, showcasing the latest content from each reading list.

You’ll notice there is a Shopping category that contains some topics, each of these topics has 10 blogs, so you are offered an RSS feed, and also an OPML file (reading list), although the Shopping category doesn’t seem to have it’s own spliced feed or OPML file.

What would be good is if the OPML files of each topic would be combined into a OPML file that is on the category page, and in turn all the category OPML files were merged into a mega OPML file on the homepage, and also all the topic spliced feeds, spliced again for each category, and then spliced again for a mega spliced feed on the front page (this would mean you are interested in everything)

…again it would be good if each category had a front page, it seems that it is skipping a level.
It seems the homepage revolves a topic, so there isn’t actually a proper homepage.

When you look at a topic (from a category) eg. the Shoes topic from the Shopping category.

You’ll notice a photo of the editor, and a description of the topic.
Then you will see each blog heading with the number of latest posts, these posts are listed underneath, then it moves to the next blog.
But these blog headings aren’t hyperlinked (don’t know why), as each post is hyperlinked to the native blog post, anyway, you’ll find a list of the blog homepages under Sources next to the editors photo, these all link to the native blogs.

You can sort each topic by time (river of news), category (don’t know what this does), or news source (latest items sorted by each blog).

The perfect scenario

This is what I think this site could do.

What this site is :

- a blog directory by category, each containing topics, and each topic containing 10 blogs
- a Public RSS Aggregator as you can view the latest contents of each blog in a topic

Each topic would have:

- a spliced RSS feed from 10 blogs
- an OPML reading list for your RSS reader (this is an OPML file where each item is a feed)
- an OPML for your browser (this is an OPML file where each item is a blog home page)
- latest posts viewed sorted by feed
- latest posts viewed by the whole topic (river of news)
- latest posts sorted by authority
- a topic tag cloud (provided each blog has categories or points to tags)…A-Z, by recency, and by frequency
- search posts by tag, or by a selection of blogs (generating an RSS feed)
- incoming links for each post
- show related posts for each post

Each category would have:

- a spliced RSS feed from each topic
- an OPML reading list for all topics in a category
- an OPML for your browser containing all topics in a category
- latest posts viewed sorted by topic
- latest posts viewed by the whole category (river of news)
- latest posts sorted by authority
- a category tag cloud (A-Z, by recency, and by frequency)
- search posts by tag, or by a selection of topics (generating an RSS feed)
- incoming links for each post
- show related posts for each post

The home page would have:

- a spliced feed from each topic
- an OPML reading list for all topics in all categories
- an OPML for your browser containing all topics in all categories
- latest posts viewed sorted by category
- latest posts viewed by all the caetgories (river of news)
- latest posts sorted by authority
- a tag cloud (A-Z, by recency, and by frequency)
- search posts by tag, or by a selection of categories (generating an RSS feed)
- incoming links for each post
- show related posts for each post

So imagine if the PubSub Librarians list was a static set of blogs and had 3 or 4 of the latest posts under each blog…and the librarian list is filed under the Technology category which is under the main home page…this is a categorised directory of reading lists, where you can see the contents and subscribe to OPML and RSS.

Even better instead of a static set of blogs this could be a dynamic set of blogs, just like PubSub is currently doing, inturn the spliced feeds and the OPML files would be dynamic.

I’ve added a little icon on my blog underneath the Corante Network badge, when clicked this launches a small browesr with the latest posts from the Corante Web Hub (network posts), the Bitty Browser is a nifty little tool.

So you can:
- see the latest entries from a feed, URL, tag of your choice (plenty to choose from the drop-down menu…it’s kind of like a meta-utility search)
- see the latest entries from a selection in the menu directory
- search Google
- re-syndicate a feed, so the latest entries are always showing

What I’d like to do is personalise the directory, so I can have my own set of categories, each containing several feeds, maybe importing an OPML file with feeds already filed in folders.

Click this button to put one on your site: