Library clips

Clipmarks is uploading their new features as we speak, and they’re just awesome.

If you are not familiar with Clipmarks, check out my earlier post…basically a folksonomy for bits of webpages rather than a link just to the page…this way you get a link to the page, but you can also display a chunk or clip from a page and add some text…you can do this as every entry has a permalink.

So think of it as del.icio.us with permalinks, and each entry can have text and a chunk from a page you are describing, also with a link to the page.

So it’s kind of like a blog folksonomy, as you can have permalinks and comments, but it is not intended for free blogging, it’s more for bookmarking a page, including a chunk of that page in your bookmark, and any text you want to add.

And of course there are tags, it’s a folksonomy after all, there are also folders, so you can have the best of both worlds.

New features

- Profile

- My clipmarks

The My Tags and My Folders sections have been joined, so you can tab between the two

- Public Clipmarks

The Top Tags and Top Clippers sections have been joined, so you can tab between the two

- Stuff I Follow

The Follower a Clipper section has been joined with a Follow a Tag to make a new section called Stuff I Follow

- Make a ClipRoll

An RSS to Javascript code available for every RSS feed, which is for basically every page on the Clipmarks website I guess

- Chatter

This has enhanced the section that aggregated comments made on your clipmarks, and comments you made on other clipmarks, and taken it to a whole new level.

This is amazing, it shows what Clipmarks are being commented on as they happen.
I hope Eric (CEO) doesn’t mind but this is what he said in an email:
“So, if you and i are looking at the same clipmark we can have a conversation about it just like over instant messenger. And, of course, anyone else looking at that page can jump in…no refresh required ever”

This feature has 3 tabs: My Clips, Public Clips, Chatter I’m In

It’s kind of looking at livemarks for del.icio.us, but you are not seeing real time bookmarks, you are seeing real time comments left on bookmarks, and you can interact immediately.
It’s really promoting discussion around a bookmark, this would be perfect for news folksonomies such as Newsvine or CommonTimes, or even Digg.

If you are logged in to Clipmarks, give Chatter a go, view the Chatter Box, each entry is referring to a post, displaying the name, number of comments, how long ago the last comment was made, user who made the comment, and the owner of the post…so if there is a discussion on one post you will see several entries in a row for the same post.
Anyway to leave a comment just click on a chatter box, and it will launch to that users clipmark, just add a comment, and then watch your comment appear in the Chatter item on the right sidebar.

What would be good is if you could click on a down arrow on the Chatter item and see the recent comment without having to launch to the page.

If you tab to Chatter I’m in, you will see an aggregate of all the comments you have made, and if you tab to My Clips, you can see all the comments left on your clipmarks.

Can’t remember if there is any type of notification if someone leaves a comment on one of your clipmark’s…email, RSS comments for a user account (maybe for a tag, or for even a clipmark - maybe that’s going too far), or even in your systems tray…actually I just noticed there is an email notification.

I know other folksonomies such as Shadows and Connotea aggregate comments, but to see this in real time and jump in as it’s happening is something special.

TechCrunch has brought the Protopage new release to my attention…this is now a clear competitor to Netvibes…see the TechCrunch post for a list of similar services.

The Protopage blog explains all the new and excellent stuff on board, I’ll also list some points:

- virtual pages
(now you can have multiple desktops, or desktop pages)

- dock panels
(minimise any panel)

- To do list panel with editor and print function
(Netvibes have plans for this)

- button for your blog
(so people can add you to their Protopage in one click)

- share pages
(I wish you could do this with Fyuze)

- Calendar

- Multiple feeds in the one scrollable panel
(I wish you could do this in Netvibes)

What a great offering, sharing pages is awesome, like I said if Fyuze could share pages you could give people a quick display of your newsmastering efforts, as an alternative to your spliced feed view in services such as SuprGlu, or Blogdigger group, or kickRSS.

Viewing feed news pages including multiple feeds is great as you can make topic news boxes, maybe I don’t need Fyuze, maybe I can make just a news page with heaps of topic news panels, and share it with others…these features such as multiple pages, sharing, mulitple feeds in a panel, full screen mode, mark as unread would be great for Netvibes.

I also love docking panels, as these pages can start to get cluttered, actually having multiple feeds in one panel also alleviates clutter.

I’ll still stick with Netvibes as it serves my general needs more, but I’ll certainly use Protopage to make news pages to share…Netvibes are great innovators, and I hope they implement some of Protopages ingenious offerings.

Some similar tools are not exactly virtual desktops, or home pages or start pages, whatever you call them, but they do focus just on displaying feed contents in feed display boxes:
Fyuze
Daily Rotation
InfoAgent
Box the web

Solution Watch has offered a great explanation on his trials of a new yet to be released service called dabble db…about page, and blog, also a demo.

With this service you can create your own databases: bookmark managers, to do lists, etc…as Brian puts it:
“The idea is that you create your own applications storing information the way you want and viewing it the way you want.”

Plenty of exporting choices…RSS and OPML on board, and also sharing your database/s for viewing or even collaboration.

This is not the same as Ning, but it is along the same lines, in enabling users to make applications to share with others…lately the web2.0 environment is really turning users into drivers.

A similar service is baseportal.

First it was the Weblogs Compendium, then the RSS compendium, now Peter Scott has the OPML compendium…including an awesome list of OPML on various search engines and tagging systems.

A few things missing from this list are compiled in one of my posts here.

Also some new additions:
OPML Sampler
OPML2RSS
OPML Generator
OPML sidebar script
eg. an OPML directory (OPML’s within OPML’s)…dynamic changes
eg. an OPML Directory as a webpage

First it was OPML2RSS now hold on we are going to go in reverse with RSS to OPML via the OPML Generator.

Just whack in some feeds and it will generate an OPML file…you will have to cut ‘n paste the code and save it as a text file with the extension .opml.

Most RSS Readers have an OPML file already for the whole account, but not many have one for each folder/tag (only one I know of is Feedmarker)…so in this case the a OPML Generator is an alternative, otherwise there is always an outline tool that generates an OPML file, but if you don’t use outlines the OPML Generator is a quick and easy specifically focused tool for the job.

Just a side note if other RSS readers followed Feedmarker and enabled an OPML file for each folder/tag, this would be excellent, as long as this OPML file has it’s own unique URL so you can share it with others (in the future - dynamic reading lists), or view it in an OPML search engine.

We all know we can go to Feed Digest and make some spliced feeds, but what if we have lots of feeds we want to splice, it’s a bit of a manual process…tough luck.
But if your feeds are already in an OPML file then there is a service that can help. Just whack in the URL of your OPML file into OPML2RSS and it will spit out a spliced feed.

It would be great if Feed Digest release this type of functionality, as we all trust and like Feed Digest…if I recall they are due for some new features, I hope OPML is in the mix.

If you use an RSS reader like Rojo, every tag has an RSS feed, meaning whatever feeds are within the tag, will be included in the spliced feed, so this may be your first go.

NOTE: the items in the OPML file have to be feeds, they can’t be normal links or text.

This is a pity, as I’ve asked this question repeatedly, give me a feed for an outline, whether the items are feeds, links, or text.

If you outline your posts first in an outliner, then push the content to your blog, your blog doesn’t have to be the conventional date order, it can be whatever.

Does a blog have to be in date order, is a blog an online diary, or just a series of daily/weekly posts filed in some manner?

So if you make the outline and then republish to the blog, you can put an OPML file icon on your blog, and since it is a blog it can have an RSS feed, this kind of answers some earlier questions like, can an outline have an RSS feed?

So at the moment if your outline is replicated in a blog it can have an RSS feed, but what about the URL of the outline, can that have an RSS feed?…this is what I want to know.
(Does the outline have to be based on hyperlinks, or can it be a folder tree or both?)

Is the only way to get an RSS feed for an outline to re-publish it in a blog, if my outline is just a simple list of links, I don’t want to make a whole blog for this, what if I want to make several outlines, I don’t want to have to make several blogs?

If I use an outline to list links, when I add links to it people can be notified, I know there are other ways to do this, but outlines also have OPML files which can be manipulated, so this gives the outline an edge compared to other ways to make lists.

BlogFresh has the freshest stuff around of late, the latest is on Commentosphere, basically a place to collate all the comments you make in the blogosphere…more here.
As you can see this is a folksonomy for comments…all made with the power of Ning, great stuff!

Personally I just tag all the comments I make in a del.icio.us account under the tag “mycomments”, I also re-syndicate this to the sidebar of my blog.

Even if you don’t have a blog, this is a great way to collate all your blog interactions, you could also re-syndicate (RSS-to-HTML via Feed Digest) into a blog (see this example), or even easier into a tool like SuprGlu (although this is more designed to present re-mix feeds)…so you could have a blog after all but the posts are actually comments you make around the place, this type of information is as handy as a blogroll, it tells you a lot about the interests of a user and people they connect to.

The only thing about using del.icio.us is that there are no permalinks, so you can’t point people to a comment you have bookmarked, that’s why re-syndicating to a blog helps, but other folksonomies have permalinks, such as Clipmarks, this tool is perfect as you can just highlight your comment and paste it into an entry in your Clipmarks account, use the whole account for comments, or keep these entries in a folder, or a tag.

Actually Clipmarks automatically keeps track of all the comments you make within the Clipmarks folksonomy as well as comments made to you, so this concept is just broadening this to the whole web.

Anyway back to Commentosphere, for a starters it lets you import bookmarks from del.icio.us.

Every entry has:

- tag/s,
- who made the comment
- the post the comment was made on
- the permalink of the comment on the post the comment was made (although not all blogs have permalinks for every comment, or I think this is the URL of the parent comment)

From the developers blog post:

“Comments are semi-threaded on Commentosphere. It works like this: when adding a comment you can specify the permalink URLs of one or more comments that this comment is a reply to. When viewing that comment in the app these ‘parent’ comments are listed and linked to. A link to ‘child’ comments is presented and, if clicked, will bring up a page of all comments who have that comment set as their parent. Multiple parents is currently a tag buggy, but that should be fixed soon.”

- the blog home page the comment was made on
- the date
- a view button (this is your permalink in your commentosphere account)
- description so you can remember the essence of the comment without having to launch to it.

As usual there is a user and tag cloud, a bookmarklet, and some great URL filtering capabilities….so you can see comments for a tag, user, a blog URL, post URL (this is a direct way to see others who have left a comment on the same post you have), and more.

Since every page, search has an RSS feed you can also follow the latest in your RSS reader.
There is even a built in inbox or aggregator, where you can track users, blogs, posts, tag/s, add from RSS (I think this means you can enter an RSS feed generated from within Commentosphere (this way you can track search feeds or tags at the user level, etc…(not sure if this is correct as it kept timing out), here’s the explanation:

“For off-Commentosphere comments you have the option of adding an RSS comments feed that will also have its content mixed into the page. The page may itself be syndicated via RSS to allow you to monitor comments from blogs across the web without cluttering your reader with all the innumerable feeds”

Also has the RSS-to-Java trick to showcase an RSS feed from the Commentosphere onto your blog sidebar, note this has amazing choices of re-syndication, you can re-syndicate even a search string, and combine it with all the other optional fields.