Bozpages: Public RSS Aggregator - river of news and display boxes
CleverClogs has the go on a new RSS multi-display box service called Bozpages…similar to Etamp and others, but with a few more view options.
A must for these services:
- multiple pages (so far only Fyuze, and Protopage - this is more of a virtual desktop than just news boxes, although you can strip it down to just show news boxes)
- multiple feeds within one box (so far topic boxes are just on Protopage)
- public (so far Protopage, and Etamp)
- etamp has the bonus that it is a folksonomy (this is more to do with discovery and sharing, than presentation)
In the above list BozPage qualifies only that it can be viewed as a public URL page (no multiple pages, or multiple feeds in the one box)…here is a sample.
Although, what I like is that for each box is that when you mouse over a headline you can see an excerpt, this is a great idea…an alternative is a little arrow next to each headline, so you can expand to read an excerpt.
There is also an odd looking tag cloud view (I guess the heavier weighted posts may be the most linked to, that is the most popular, if so, maybe you could choose to sort the headlines in the normal view by popularity ranking as well as default date).
The third way to look at you news is via a river of news approach…kind of like SuprGlu, all that is missing is the tag cloud, and each source listed on the sidebar (although, SpurGlu is missing the feed icon next to each source).
NOTE: unlike Blogdigger Groups, SuprGlu can’t generate search feeds, or view posts by just one source, but it does have a tag cloud which is great…what about a feed for each tag.
Next with these tools, I’d like to be able to group the source feeds in folders, just like a personal aggregator…then view just one feed, a folder of feeds, or the whole account…
In fact I was going to post later today about the possibility of Public RSS Aggregators like SuprGlu, Blogdigger groups, kickRSS to also offer a display box view, but Bozpages has beat them to the punch.
Just whack in some feeds, or import an OPML and you instantly have a Public RSS Aggregator - river of news style (like a blog) or feed display box style.
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The tag cloud needs work yeah, It’s a big overwhelming to see blog posts that way. My thinking atm is for the tag cloud to warp into something that quickly just gives you the big news items.
I mainly stick to the river of news style or the default style of reading news on bozpages - I still read most things in my blog reader, but the idea behind bozpages is that in casual reading I’d rather not get pushed content, i’d rather only read it when I feel like it.
So the point of bozpages is to have multiple, and then visit in varying frequencies. Like I have a vanity search bozpage that I visit pretty frequently (it’s how I found this post) - it aggregates blogsearches from various engines and on various queries. But I also have an Apple News bozpage that aggregates a lot of Apple news blogs like thinksecret, I’m only somewhat interested in Apple news, so I visit it only sometimes.
BozPages currently are very lightweight and simple in terms of registration - my goal was to avoid having to require annoying registration, and making them totally simple to share and riff on. If you don’t like a feed in my OPML, just cut it out and fork your own bozpage, etc. Of course this means that some features are just impossible, so I am also thinking about adding registration as just an optional thing that lets you do the things that are impossible without registration - like tagging, private pages.
BTW if you are a serious hacker you can actually combine feeds in bozpages, bozpages themselves can be aggregated into other bozpages = combined feeds
BozPages btw is an open source project, wiki @ http://swik.net/BozPages
Comment by Alex Bosworth — December 14, 2005 @ 7:06 am
Of what you mention Suprglu missing, Peoplefeeds has. You can view items by category (bookmarks, photos, blog, etc.), you have the entire tag cloud available, you can browse by it, and everything is available/remixable with RSS. You also have watchlists so you can easily build up an OPML of other people’s stuff (optionall remixed/spliced by tag).
My profile: http://peoplefeeds.com/bosko/profile
if you’re looking for an example.
My watchlist:
http://peoplefeeds.com/bosko/watchlist
-Bosko
Comment by Bosko Milekic — December 14, 2005 @ 8:24 pm