Library clips

In an earlier post I was shouting out about the push towards Reading Lists.

We’ve talked about creating, and using, and browsing, and discovering, but what about searching in Reading Lists.

Here are some tools on creating, using, browsing and discovery:

OPML Editor (News River)
OPML Manager
WOW OPML Browser
OPML Surfer
OMNI Outliner
BlogBridge
Taskable
OPML Workstation
Kosso’s OPML Manager
OPML Browser
Social Bookmarking RSS Feeds - OPML Generator (code only - save it locally, then import it to a service that can host it on a URL)
OPML Generator (code only - save it locally, then import it to a service that can host it on a URL)
…also most RSS Readers output an OPML URL for the whole account, Feedmarker also does this for each tag
…some search engines generate OPML files, like gada.be, MonitorThis (code only), and Kebberfegg.

The important thing besides creating an OPML code or an OPML file is to give it a URL, some services above, like OPML Workstation and OPML Manager, will host your OPML files, giving each one a URL.
This is important so we can then search within the OPML, ie. search within a batch of feeds via one URL.

Also note, that for a service to search your OPML file, you will probably have to register your OPML, and also ping it when it updates.

Feedster Advanced - will search posts within feeds in a OPML URL (this will also generate a search feed, by date or relevance)…this is great!!

OPML Search allows you to search across all OPML URL’s in the system…but it doesn’t let you search within a specific URL of your choice, like Feedster allows.

Also it doesn’t seem to search in posts within feeds (does this mean it’s not full-text), as when I do a search it returns mentions of the term in folder names or feeds names in the OPML, but not the posts within the feeds.

One thing this tool has over Feedster is that it can search in an OPML file where the items are not RSS feeds, but just links or text…(NOTE: these types of OPML URl’s are not Reading Lists).

You can limit your search where the items in the OPML are podcasts only, OPML only (yes that’s right, an item in your OPML can be another OPML), RSS only, categories only, or ALL (”all” will pick up items that are just text or HTML links, as just mentioned above).

…category must searches within OPML outlines that are tagged…who does the tagging?

There is another search box to search for a term appearing in the URL.

Every result generates a search feed and an OPML file.

For every item in the results you can also browse an outline of the OPML file, read the posts in the feeds from the OPML file, and listen to podcasts in the OPML.
You can also subscribe to the item results feed
(this means that when you search for a term like “phone”, an item in the results may be a Google search feed for the term “phone” that lives in a particular OPML, amongst all the other feeds that live in that OPML).

ScoopGo! allows you to enter multiple RSS feeds in order to create a searchbox…pity you can’t load some feeds in via an OPML file, or even just enter an OPML URL, so it can search the feeds via the OPML URL.

Keep in mind this only searches within feed content, so if a blog just offers excerpt feeds, it won’t search the whole blog post…this is the limitation of searching in feeds.

Similar tools like Rollyo and Swicki search in the HTML of multiple blogs rather than the RSS feeds.

What if you make an OPML file where all the items are blog homepages, you could then import this into Rollyo or Swicki, instead of doing each one manually, or what about if this OPML file lived at an URL, could Rollyo or Swicki search these blogs via the OPML URL.

Now I wish Technorati could search in an OPML like Feedster, even OPML’s that are made up of text or homepage links…what about Technorati Blog Finder, each expert group could have an OPML URL, and we could search within that…hang on, you can already search within an expert group…ohh well.

OPML search wishlist

- Search in the full-text of posts from feeds in an OPML
(also limit this to term appearing in the feed title name)

- Search in the full-text of posts from sites (home page links) in an OPML
(also limit this to term appearing in the site title eg. blog name)

So far these first two are the similar, only one searches full-text of the feed, and the other full-text site searching.

- both methods above, but search is limited to items within a folder/tag name, eg. if you have an OPML and the items are organised in folders, this type of search will just search within that folder of the OPML

- both methods above, but limited to one or a selection of OPML URL’s, even limit this again to a folder/tag

- inurl search for a term, not only the URL of the OPML file, but the URL’s of the items within it

- blank search of an OPML URL…this is like seeing a river of news of a spliced feed, the advantage is that you could sort this by popularity…put that in your RSS Reader and smoke it!