Library clips

In a previous post I described how you can make an RSS feed for a Bloglines citation search, if you are doing this for your own blog this is commonly called an ego feed.

Anyway the easiest way to do this was to use TalkDigger and only select the Bloglines engine…the only thing missing was that you can’t limit it to avoid items from your own domain…you can do this if viewing the results in TalkDigger, but you can’t do this in the RSS version that you create.

Marshall Kirkpatrick responded to my post with a simple explanation, but it seems I used the wrong term in my post, I said you can’t cut out duplicates with TalkDigger when creating a feed, but this is wrong as Fred says in his post:
“All the duplicated results (the same article returned by two different search engines) are deleted (only one will be displayed).”

Since my post was creating an ego feed for Bloglines (one engine), duplicates wasn’t a great concern, but TalkDigger does this anyway, as does FeedDigest….but when creating a meta-ego feed (a spliced feed from many engines, then cutting out duplicates is really handy).

So both Feed Digest and TalkDigger will remove duplicates, with Feed Digest you have to go to each engine to generate your feed, then when you have them ready on the splicing block you select to remove duplicates before you submit…whereas TalkDigger is a tool the focuses on just this one feature, ie. conversations around a URL. So it is much easier to make a spliced ego feed (automatically without duplicates) at TalkDigger, simply enter your URL, select your engines and done.

So at the moment my last issue is to make the results cleaner in the spliced feed by removing links from my own domain…this should be easy for TalkDigger to implement as it is already a feature when you view the HTML results at TalkDigger itself.