Library clips

Thought I’d clear this up for a few people I’ve been talking to.

If you create a Reading List in BlogBridge you can showcase it on your sidebar.

But what if you want to showcase two or more Reading Lists, this would take up a lot of room on your sidebar…I wonder if you could list just the Reading List titles as a folder, and click on a collapse/expand symbol to see all the feeds in each list.

This is exactly what you can do with OPML Renderer, here’s an example…but you can also do more.

You will notice the difference here is that the Reading List contains Reading Lists itself, so this Reading List in particular is pointing to Reading Lists other people have created…each has an arrow to the OPML URL….so it can be considered as a mother Reading List I suppose.
This too has an OPML (see the icon), I’m not sure if you can subscribe to this in BlogBridge, if you try it, it may just flatten out or merge the feeds into one long list, losing the organisation aspect.

At the moment you can’t make these types of Reading Lists in BlogBridge…when you make a Reading List in BlogBridge the items are RSS URL’s (feeds), but when you make a mother Reading List, the items are OPML URL’s (that contain feeds)…and to my knowledge BlogBridge won’t accept OPML inclusions as they are not feeds.

When a Reading List or any OPML for that matter contains OPML URL’s as items this is called OPML inclusion…you can create a mother Reading List/root OPML/OPML menu (that accepts OPML inclusion) at OPML Workstation.

NOTE: BlogBridge can only create and use one type of OPML, that is OPML’s where the items are feeds, we call these Reading Lists…this is a great feature for a service that is predominatly an RSS Reader.
You can make other types of OPML, and OPML Workstation is a focused tool to do just this…you can create OPML URL’s that contain feeds (Reading Lists), HTML (Link Lists), text, and OPML’s (OPML inclusion), or a combination.
I don’t think this is the market for BlogBridge as they are not an OPML outliner in general, they are an RSS Reader, that has some extra capabilities (read feeds via OPML).

Back to it…

I think OPML Renderer is just great to showcase your OPML outline on your blog sidebar, but the problem for me is it’s a plugin, this is a bit hard when you are using a hosted blog.

So my next choice would be OPod, but again it’s a plug in, but the bonus here is that you can also read the contents of your feeds, so besides being an OPML reader (like OPML Renderer, it also has a mini RSS reader built in).

So my next choice is the go, Bitty is similar to OPod but it will be hosted, and where OPod only accepts OPML URL’s, Bitty accepts OPML, HTML, RSS, etc…with easy subscription modules to boot, and not only that it is also a mini search browser.

Examples

Here is an example of an OPML URL that contains OPML’s that contain feeds (a Reading List that contains Reading Lists).

OPML Renderer
Here is the OPML.

Enter this same OPML URL into OPod and see the results.

See it in Bitty…this rocks.

As you can see it looks like a Reading List menu…so the idea is to make different topic based Reading Lists, or even grab your friends Reading List, and include them as items in a new OPML URL…as mentioned before this will be a Reading List Directory or menu. The bonus is that you can also read the feeds within the browser and it is all hosted on your sidebar.

Next I’d like to do this with Link Lists where my items in an OPML are just HTML links and not feeds, then put the OPML of each of these Link Lists into a new OPML (Link List Directory).

Since my Link Lists are all done in del.icio.us I wish each tag had an OPML URL, and each tag bundle had an OPML URL…this tag bundle would be the mother OPML (Link List Directory or menu).
All I’d have to do is put the OPML URL of the del.icio.us tag bundle in Bitty, and I’m done…a mini del.icio.us on my sidebar.

Tony Hirst has come up with another del.icio.us hack, this one is hiding results from a tag via a bookmarklet.

Once you have your results page, then you can hide bookmarks from a certain tag by highlighting it and hitting the bookmarklet…so you are doing the NOT step after the initial search.

deli.sear.ch is an easier form to search the full-text of bookmarks within a del.icio.us user tag

…it is built on the idea from miniSearch.

Here’s a miniSearch example:

I put in a del.icio.us URL for my tag called “podcast”
http://del.icio.us/johnt/podcast
…and my search term is “williams”.

Result via Yahoo!

This is what the query in the search box looks like:

williams (url:http://www.podtranscript.com/ OR url:http://www.feed2podcast.com/ OR url:http://www.bigcontact.com/feedplayer.php?xmlurl= OR url:http://www.blogdigger.com/blog/2005/09/27/1127853231000.html OR url:http://contentfactor.blogspot.com/2005/05/podcasting-fast-forward.html OR url:http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/09/finding_the_gem.html OR url:http://odeo.com/blog/2005/08/collaborative-podcast.html OR url:http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/08/yahoo_launches__1.html OR url:http://lispodcasts.com/ OR url:http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/index.cfm?fa=printArticle&ID=1239 OR url:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/)

As you can notice not all my 26 items within this tag have been searched…so this seems a limited method.

Tony Hirst has made a form to generate Reading Lists via del.icio.us…nice and easy, thanks Tony.

Check out the bookmarklet…just goto one of your del.icio.us tags that is a Reading List, and hit the bookmarklet…it will automatically generate an OPML URL…quicker and easier.

Also check out the Social Bookmarking RSS feeds - OPML Generator…see more.

Content aggregation is the new thing, we all do our fair share of Newsmastering, by splicing blog feeds, or splicing tag feeds, to show a topic based river of news…the most talked about tool at the moment is SuprGlu.

Well now developers are going beyond just a river of news and creating a whole service around aggregated tag content or structured blogging content…data is king at the moment.

eg. edgeio collects blog posts with the tag “listing”, and lists the post as a classified listing…it also sends a trackback to the blog post saying it’s now listed (which you can then go to the edgeio site and tags to your listing).

eg. KritX collects blog posts that are “reviews”…using structured blogging (microformats), ie. a review markup or field in the blog post will ping KritX, and it will add your post.

eg. Podcast Tags will aggregate posts using the rel= format popularised by Technorati…only it wants you to point to their URL and not Technorati…no problem, Technorati will pick this up anyway (it doesn’t care who you point to).

So, now if we can define the type of blog post it is, services can pick up this up and aggregate this content into their service. The competitive edge is no longer content, it is how you use your content (eg. memeorandum), the user interface, personalisation, customisation, and of course social features that are the go at the moment.

I spoke of this a while ago:

“The notion of structured blogging and dataBlogging will contribute to the semantic web; by adding tags to blog content we can derive context. As is mentioned in this article if content such as a job listing is tagged with the appropriate tag, then any website can aggregate all job listings, the current players will need to re-think their services other than just providing content…lots of players are starting to aggregate content, just look at Yahoo! News or Google News, they are the new competition to traditional news aggregators, so now services are moving forward beyond just delivering content, and into customer service such as personalisation, customisation and integration.”

Also check out Community Engine to see how to make your own using the xFolk microformat.

Also see the come to me web.