Library clips

ListMixer is a bookmarklet which enables you to bookmark webpages, these bookmarks have a shelf life of 30 days, unless you click on them.

You can access your collection or bookmark a page via the same bookmarklet.

To add a page all you do is click the bookmarklet, as per usual you fill in the details, and make a category (only one per bookmark) or choose one from your list…then you can submit and browse, or submit and return or cancel…or don’t add the bookmark at all and click the button to browse your account.

If you hover the mouse over each bookmark you can choose to visit the link (remember it will expire in a month if you don’t visit), Edit the link, Delete the link, Delete and Visit the Link, or add it to a smorgasboard of social bookmark services.

All in all this is great if you don’t want to add stuff to your social bookmark manager straight away, you’d rather check it out first before committing…like a holding bay.

More

- Share your bookmarks on a public page
- Recruit people to communally add to your account (this will email your personal page to a friend, email it to yourself if you use more than one computer…all this is neccessary as there is no login system)
- RSS feed for your account, also re-syndicate feed via the linkroll

Your whole account is one long page, when you make categories they are listed on the top of the page, click on a category to jump to a spot.

Sample

[ADDED: here is the competitor, Scratchlist]

I’ve been hanging out to post about this one, Grazr mini, is a sidebar widget for your blog, it allows you to read the contents of a Reading List.

So first we had a blogroll, then with OPML we could list the feeds of our blogroll in a neat package (Reading List), and now we can also read the contents. So I guess it is a mini RSS Reader via an OPML URL that contains feeds only.

Similar tools are Bitty and OPod an OPML Renderer (if it updates with features from Optimal)…these tools (including mini Grazr) aren’t limited to just Reading Lists, they accept any kind of OPML.

Look out for the main Grazr site coming soon…thanks for the sneak peak.

See an example on the Grazr Blog, and on James’s Blog…more…and the latest.

I was thinking of ways to notify people about updates on a corporate blog if they are not RSS Savvy. Of course they could subscribe to the email alert, but what about new people, how will they know about the blog or to subscribe to it….the other option is to push emails the old fashioned way, but I think we are moving into more of a pull landscape.

When someone joins an organisation they are placed into the appropriate email groups in order to communicate with the right people to do their job…so why can’t this happen as well with blog subscriptions.

I wonder if you can enter an outlook email group into a email subscription box in a corporate blog, if you could when ever a new staff member jpins an email group, they will automatically be subscribed to the blog
(this is kind of “push” as the person can’t decide if they want to join, well it is “pull” without consent).

Maybe OPML is the open answer to this question, you could keep an OPML URL of a heap of email addresses, and when ever someone is added to that OPML, then whatever subscribes to it will also see the changes.

Hang on, this seems like I’m asking the corporate blog to subscribe to the OPML, instead of the other way around.

OPML for email would also be good if you started a new email client or address and you wanted to import/export contacts, or even contacts from another type of service…OPML is the answer as it is non-proprietary.

So back to my question, can you subscribe to a blog with an email group file that represents lots of email addresses?

If so will it be dynamic, so new people added to the list will be receive blog content by email…maybe it could recognise the contact has been added and send out an automatic welcoming.

Can this be done with an OPML URL that contains email addresses as items, at the moment OPML has 3 item types: text, links, rss (”links” can also be used for a non-HTML URL, such as an OPML URL)…will we need another type called “mailto”?

OPML possibilities are endless, what else can we do with packaged data?

Technorati has included another sorting feature on it’s popular blogs page, now you can sort by most read feeds according the Technorati Favourites Community.

Top 100 Blogs sorted by:
- most incoming links
- most subscribed

Now where is the spliced feed for these 2 lists, and where is the OPML URL so it can be a Reading List (maybe a Grazing List if the feeds are continuously changing)

Why not combine Blog Finder so the Top 100 is categorised into topics, then we could have Topic Reading Lists, although BlogFinder already has OPML Reading Lists by popularity.

Or what about if you could tag your Technorati Favourites, then we could see the Top 100 sorted by favourites, categorised by user tags, another form of Popular Topic Reading Lists.

Technorati Tags doesn’t have post sorting by popularity, if it did you could see the latest posts by a tag in the last hour, sorted by popularity. Adam Green could hack up an OPML Grazing List from these posts.

[via Micro Persuasion]

Top 10 Sources is a great example of an OPML Directory where every item is an OPML URL, in this example the owner has created the OPML Directory and all the OPML URL’s that the directory points to.

Then this OPML Directory can be viewed in an OPML outline, or an OPML Browser/Reader…but most impressive is that the OPML Directory can be presented in a HTML webpage…where it looks like an ultimate newsmastering topic directory stream.

STRUCTURE

Top 10 Sources (home page)
>Topic Headings (currently 24)
>>Sub-Topic Headings (various amounts for each topic)
>>>10 sources within each sub-topic (these sources are the blog RSS feeds)

At the moment I can only see an OPML URL, and a spliced feed for each Sub-Topic…there doesn’t seem to be an OPML URL or spliced feed for each Topic Heading (where’s the river of news at this level)…and there doesn’t seem to be an OPML URL, and a spliced feed for the whole kit and kaboodle.

To make an OPML Directory out of this page I would have to create an OPML for each of the 24 Topic Headings, and include the Sub-Topic OPML’s as the items…then I would have to make a root OPML, and include each of these newly made 24 OPML’s as items…this would be my dynamic OPML Directory.

Actually since all the items in all these OPML’s are feeds, this is more specifically a Reading List Directory.

[ADDED 13/03/06: Bela has supplied us with an OPML URL for the whole of Top 10 Sources, see it in the outline in OPML Workstation, see it in Optimal OPML Reader].

Just say I went and made my own Reading List Directory, great I could browse/read it at Optimal or my personal RSS Reader (if it can use/subscribe to Reading Lists)…but what about a HTML presentation.

What if I could take this OPML Directory and plug it into a newsmastering service, like Blogdigger Groups, now that would be awesome…I could edit the content remotely (eg. an OPML outliner like OPML Workstation), but it could be presented elsewhere (eg. Blogdigger Groups).

Then I could also search the portal, create search feeds, and all the content would be archived.

Also see Dynamic newsmastering with OPML.

Hmmm

I just noticed that we are offered 2 type of OPML URL’s for each Sub Topic, one for an OPML Browser, and one for an RSS Reader.

The one for the aggregator (RSS Reader) is subscribing to a Reading List, so far BlogBridge and NewsRiver are the only RSS Readers with this feature.
This OPML (Reading List) can also be read with Opod, Bitty, Taskable, OPML2PDF, or Optimal…these are all OPML Browsers that can also read feeds.

The one for OPML Browsers can be browsed at the above 4 OPML Readers (excluding OPML2PDF), plus other OPML Browsers such as OPML Surfer, Voidstar OPML Browser, etc…
This one can’t be used in RSS Readers as the items are not feeds, they are HTML links.

Example - Shoes

OPML - for the OPML Browser

OPod (try it)

Bitty

Optimal

Taskable

OPML Surfer

Voidstar OPML Browser

I don’t quite understand how this OPML is kept up to date with the latest posts from each source, can anyone shed any light here?
…as the items in this OPML are just links, how do the links for each source appear automatically in this OPML in order for it to be kept up to date?

The only way I could see this happen is if each source blog had an OPML of its own…see here.
Then your would create an OPML and each item would be the OPML of each blog, this is a bit hard when blogs usually don’t have OPML’s.

[ADDED 13/03/06: See comment below, apparently they are updated as they are cached from a database…so now I’m wondering why you don’t see all the items as an archive, maybe you just see the last cache.
This sounds similar to how Utils mirrors the del.icio.us database every 4 hours]

OPML - for the RSS Reader

NewsRiver

BlogBridge

OPod (try it)

Bitty (notice that you are feed reading and not reading from the native page)

Optimal (notice that you can read from the feed)

Taskable

OPML2PDF (ignore the page heading)

Notice you can’t read the feed content in Voidstar OPML Browser, or OPML Surfer.

Also see other OPML Browsers/Readers/Editors at these 2 posts.