Library clips

I mentioned Chuquet in a previous post about Rojo…I found it via this comment.

As far as I can work out this engine is based on a bunch of feeds, but you aren’t reading the posts from these feeds ranked by popularity, you are reading what they are linking to (the results are then ranking by popularity)…each item will list the posts from your feeds that mention them.

Example

Just say you could personalise Chuquet on your OPML, which they plan to offer in the near future.

Just say your OPML contains 50 blog feeds, and from all the posts in these 50 feeds, 16 posts point to a particular website or blog post in the web or blogosphere, a further 10 posts point to another website, then another 7 posts point to another website, and so on.

NOTE: by “point to”, I mean in the blog post the blogger includes a hyperlink to somewhere (a website or a blog homepage or a blog post, etc…), this is usually called an “outgoing link”.

As mentioned before next to each item it will list the blog posts from your OPML that linked to it

…I guess it could also list the Technorati Cosmos for each item to see how many other blog posts outside your OPML are also pointing to this item.

Each item also lists how long ago it was when the last blog post from your OPML pointed to it.

So as you can see the items in the results are ranked according to how many blog posts in my OPML are pointing to them (popularity).

But on a second look I see that some items further down the list have more links pointing to them than items at the top of the list…so I’m not to sure how the ranking works.

I can imagine they have to avoid a post staying on the top as no other post may topple it for months, this just wouldn’t make sense…the tagline for this service is: “The Buzz: most linked-to sites of the moment”…so maybe the ranking is based on which post has the most links pointing to it in the last hour.

Clarify

So this engine actually might not show any posts from the source feeds (like a personal RSS Reader), it only shows posts that the source feeds link to…this will only happen (show any posts from a source feed) if a source feed points to a post that happens to come from another source feed.

Again it does not show every post from your feeds ranked by popularity, it shows what the posts from your source feeds are linking to (ordered by popularity)…so it’s an outgoing links engine…I think.

I mean the items are generated by the outgoing links from a bunch of source feeds…so every item in the results has incoming links from the source feeds, that’s the only way an item will be featured in the results.

…so then it must be popular items (via incoming links) based on the outgoing links of items in an OPML (bunch of source feeds).

RSS Reader

Rojo has utilised this data in their RSS Reader in the “Recommended Links” section…not sure of the ranking, but it shows outgoing links from all the blog posts in your subscriptions for the last 7 days.

It would be great if the results could be ranked by the last hour, last day, last week, etc…this way you could see what the most popular blog post or website your subscriptions are talking about within the last hour, last day, last week, last year…same goes for Chuquet.

Chuquet Tag cloud

Chuquet has a tag cloud view of the most linked to site (not sites) of the moment…not sure if they are based on the tags from the native posts.

So this is the same as the main screen but just based on a topic…again not sure how topics are defined, or more importantly what items belong in a topic. It could be based on tags in the native posts, but I think it may be more based on text analysis, like TagCloud, or even context analysis.

As an alternative to the tag cloud you can also search for a tag in the search box.

Actually whether you click on the tag cloud or search for a tag, on the results page the tagline is “Search results for…”…so now I realise the tags are keyword searches.

Also each tag (search result) generates an RSS feed…cool!

Recap

So you are not reading your feeds per se, you are reading what your feeds are pointing to…in fact you may never come across an actual post from one of your feeds, you are just using these feeds as your back end sources.

To my understanding Chuquet does not say “here is a bunch of feeds, rank posts by most incoming links”…instead it says “here is a bunch of feeds, collect all the websites each post in each feed links to, and will present these websites in most popular order (and next to each item you can see the posts from your OPML that pointed to the item).

It is not a replacement to your ususal feed reading in an RSS Reader, it’s using data from your posts to generate some recommended links, and this is what Rojo does.
Gee, I haven’t even got time to read my feeds, now I have to make time to read recommended posts as well.
If I read just recommended posts I’d be up on the most popular talk of the moment, but I also like reading what I personally like, not just what’s popular.

Is this like your own personal Memeorandum?

Memeorandum may be different…it may have a bunch of source feeds and then showcase the posts from these feeds that are most popular (as well as its clever related items feature).

Whereas Chuquet doesn’t showcase any posts from its source feeds intentionally, the items instead are the most popular outgoing links based on the source feeds

…if I am correct, there is a difference here.

I guess Memeorandum is closer to arranging posts in your RSS Reader by popularity, just like OPML Sampler…to mimick it we would then need FeedFlare to show incoming links from the Technorati Cosmos and Waypath Related to find similar items.

Anyway I would like my RSS Reader to have my own personal Memeorandum as well as my own personal Chuquet.

At the moment Rojo has “Recommended Links” which is a watered down version of Chuquet, and for a personal Memeorandum, we’d have to use the tools mentioned above for now.

If you have Rojo set on manually marking a feed as read….then you read a feed and decide you haven’t got time to read it all, just close down Rojo, and the feed will still be there as unread.

But what if, when you were reading this feed you collapse/expanded an item, then closed Rojo…well, when you view that feed again all items will still be unread accept the one you have collapse/expand (as this action considers an item as read)…same goes with the items you tagged, flagged, clicked on the title, emailed, or shared.

So to see this item again (the item you collapse/expand), when reading your feed just choose to see read & unread items, and there it will be
…or go to your “Saved” section, and view “Stories I’ve Read”, and here you will see it to.

Stories I’ve Read

This section contains the items (stories) that you have collapse/expand, flagged, tagged, clicked on the title, emailed, and shared…it considers any of these actions as showing interest in the story…so it is basically a folder the automatically populates with items you find interesting.

NOTE: If you click on “Mark as Read” for the whole page you are viewing these stories WILL NOT appear in the “Stories I’ve Read” section…same goes if you collapse/expand all stories.

NOTE: If you want to see every story that has ever been in your account…when you log in the first view is “Recent Stories from all Feeds”, just click on “Show Read & Unread”.

Basically the “Stories I’ve Read” folder contains stories you consider interesting, therefore the system can use this information to rank new unread stories. Besides viewing stories by latest date, Rojo offers to view stories by “Relevancy”…this relevancy view must be based on the content in the “Stories I’ve Read” folder.

Issues

If you flag or tag a story there is a good chance you find it relevant…but if you collapse/expand a story I don’t think this action neccessarily means you find the story interesting, I think it just means the title may have interested you so you expanded it, maybe to find out you don’t like what you see, or you collapsed it to get it out the way.

Same goes with clicking on the title of a story, you may do this to read the native website as the feed in Rojo only had excerpts, so naturally you launch to the native site…only to find out you may not be interested in the story after all.

And, you may email or share a story, as it may interest others, but may not have any interest to you.

I think there is some semantics in the term “interest”, as you may show interest to see more, but find out your investigative interest led you to nothing interesting at all.

In summary, I don’t think collapse/expand, clicking on the title, emailing, or sharing a story are specific enough actions to define your interests…flagging, and tagging I consider more of an appropriate measure of interest or attention.

The unfortunate thing is that you can’t clean up your “Storeies I’ve Read” section so it just contains the attention data that you know is relevant…it would be good if you could do this from time to time, refreshing your attention data, in order for your Relavancy view to be updated to your pruned and current attention stream.

So if you email, share, or click on the title of a story you have no way to stop this appearing in the “Stories I’ve Read” folder…this means you can’t avoid the noise that your relevancy will be based on, so this relevancy in turn won’t be personally accurate.

The only thing you can avoid is collapse/expanding stories, by always having expand on, in this case you will not need to manipulate an item, preventing unfortunate items to appear in your “Stories I’ve Read” folder.

Voting Hack

What you can do is always have stories expanded, when ever you see a story you really like but you are not sharing, emailing, clicking the title, flagging, or tagging it, make sure you collapse it so it records in your attention stream, ie. the “Stories I’ve Read” folder.

Better still RSS Readers could just add a voting button, as this will explicitly say, “I like this item, please record it in my attention stream”…whether you perform any of the actions above (flag, tag, share, etc…), you have to vote for the item for it to go in your attention stream folder.

At the moment your attention stream is not explicit (it is recorded in the background), this is great as the user doesn’t have to do anything…on the other hand, voting is explicit and therefore accurate…it will make the relevancy more worth while.

Otherwise the only way around this, as mentioned before, is to be able to prune your attention folder, ie. the “Stories I’ve Read” folder.

…see an earlier post on Rojo.

MyGlu is taking the SuprGlu idea but applying it to your own website, instead of having to use a space on the SuprGlu site…it will also allow filtering feeds for a search term…not sure if it will aggregate a tag cloud.

By the way check out, probably one of the earliest Newsmastering projects, Edu_RSS….latest listings presents the content of a massive spliced feed.
All the sources (feeds) in this spliced feed have also been categorised into topics, so you can follow the latest within a topic…choose from the many on offer
…actually on second thought I think they are the same massive set of feeds, only they are filtered for a search term, so the topics you see are the search terms.

Here is a list of the source feeds…and here is the OPML Reading List.

So, the Latest listing, is like a SuprGlu page, or a BlogDigger Groups page, etc…and the topic listings are like a search term on a BlogDigger Group…each search has a feed and is then made into it’s own page.

By the way there is also a ticker, I think these are coming back in vogue.

Another way around this is to splice all your feeds at Feed Digest or MySyndicaat, put a filter on if you like, and then output RSS to HTML (MySyndicaat doesn’t have this yet) and whack this in a blog…see an example (this example is using the Feed Digest feed for the blog, in this instance it hasn’t been spliced or filtered).

This way you are not limited to SuprGlu, you can present your stuff on a blog, and pretty it up as much as you like…but I must say the SuprGlu tag cloud is awesome.

24eyes is an RSS dashboard…a personal RSS Reader with a difference. Feed content is presented in widgets (RSS display boxes)…as many as you want on a page…and you can have as many pages as you want, these pages are organised into tabs or dashboards, as they are also called.

This tool blows Fyuze, etamp, and others away…it also focuses on RSS widgets, as opposed to many personal homepages, like Netvibes, which have RSS boxes as one of the many features

…I’ve really being waiting for a service that just does this one thing and 24eyes, does it so well.

One thing missing is you don’t have a URL to share with people, ie. making your own news portal for public consumption
…when you enter the URL it remembers your subscriptions, must be a cookie thing, but what about loggin in from any computer, and again sharing your newsmastering efforts for others to see.

Besides reading feeds you can also save (clip) items and tag items (not sure of the difference)…these 2 spaces also appear as widgets.

From any item, you can:

- open
- save
- email
- tag

…you can also choose items to have excerpts, and date as opposed to just titles.

From any widget (window), you can:

- create a new widget (window)
- refresh the window you are on
- enter a feed to change the content of window or from a new window
- or select a feed from the catalogue
- create a search feed from numerous search engines
- access my clippings
- access my tags
- feed properties

The only problem is that once you access your clippings or tags the window won’t change back to the feed it was on.

So I suggest making a permanent window for both clippings and tags, and maybe keep them under a tab called “My Stuff”.

Wow, this is a folksonomy for saved items as well, when you view a tag, it offers related tags and asks if you want to view items by all users with that tag.

I suggest also making a a permanent window for the tag folksonomy…highlight a window, go to the menu and choose “Find Tags”.

You can also find feeds this way via a search box.

You can also find dashboards as well, these are pre-loaded tabs (similar to a folder of feeds in a regular RSS Reader)

It doesn’t stop, you can also import, select, export feed catalogues…these are referring to an OPML feature.

Then, under the layout menu, you can email, share, publish a tab (dashboard)…when you publish a tab, it generates code to add it to your website…ie. RSS to Java resyndication for your blog sidebar.

So it’s like a personal RSS Reader with a more visual perspective, and instead of folders you have pages.

This is another way of presenting your newsmastering efforts alongside river of news tools like SuprGlu, MySyndicaat, kickRSS, Blogdigger Groups, etc…also see Bozpages (incorporates multiple views).

Again a login account, and a URL to share your own 24eyes would be supremo.

Clipmarks has yet again added some innovative features to its product and redesigned the whole interface…I think it looks much less cluttered and is very easy to get around…I like it a lot.

Basically it is similar to the 3 pane email view…click on a tag/folder, middle column shows a list of entries, and clicking on an item will show it in full on the right column…you can now also easily add comments there and then.

Besides adding comments you can now also vote for an item by “popping it”…now you can browse by most popular item according to votes (pops).

Browse items by most recent clipmark, most recently commented on clipmark, most recently popped clipmark…or a combination.

Next I’d like to sort items the same way but based on popularity
eg. most clipped clipmark, most commented on clipmark, most popped clipmark (showing the number of votes)…also sorting this by the last hour, day, week, etc…

And what about the view, it’s all in real-time (previously only the comments had a real-time view), this means you don’t have to refresh the page, you’ll notice that new entries magically appear…you can turn this off by clicking pause. The pause button will become more needed when clipmarks is more heavily used, if it becomes anything like del.icio.us (livemarks), an item you’re looking at moves to the bottom of the page in 2 seconds.

See an earlier post, and more about the newest features at the clipmark blog (especially the new print feature).