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March 10, 2006

FeedXS: feeds without the blog

Filed under: blogs, rss, folksonomy

FeedXS is very unique, it is like a bookmark folksonomy, or blog folksonomy environment, only you don’t have a blog, you just have a generic user page with a list of your posts…it’s like having a blog without the blog…actually you can have lots of blogs within your user space.

I guess this is not too different than a blog or note folksonomy I mentioned a while back…a generic notepad that generates a feed, when I say notepad I mean just the content without the container…like having just the blog content without the blog, this is what a feed page usually is, but you can render these feed pages so they look user friendly, Feedburner does this.
Anyway, your space is purely for content, without the fancy blog trims, and it looks generic and is housed in a folksonomy…so type away in the editor, add hyperlinks, formatting, etc…

Once you set up an account your first feed (or blog/text space) is created, so how do you post items to show in your feed…well you have a WYSIWYG editor.

Here’s my public user space…as you can see it lists my feeds (at the moment I have 2 feeds…this is like having 2 text spaces or blogs I guess)…and at the moment I have 3 posts from the 2 text spaces. One of my feeds is called johnt notepad, the other Library clips notes…you can click to see either of my 2 text spaces (they call these feeds) or you can subscribe to them via the RSS feed

…you can create as many feeds as you like, it’s like having heaps of blogs in the same space.

Once you are looking at a feed or text space as I like to call it, you can see the posts sorted by date, title, etc
At this page you can view the raw feed, or subscribe to the feed of this text space to add it to your own FeedXS Subscriptions.
That’s right, not only can you create numerous text spaces (feeds) you share and discover new ones and add them to your subscriptions section.

Here is a post from one of my feeds (text spaces).
If you are looking at a post from another users feed (text space) you can click “copy” and it will start you a new article to edit.

Dashboard

This is what your personal dashboard has:

My feeds - a list of all your feeds (text spaces)
New feed - create a new feed (text space)
My articles - a river of news from all your feeds (text spaces)…this is not public and doesn’t have a spliced feed
New article - WYSIWYG editor…there is a drop down to choose the feed (text space) for the post.
My subscriptions - a list of feeds (text spaces) you have collected…click on one to see the list of posts, then click on a post…you can also search for feeds from the community.

The front page lists Most Active Feeds, Most Viewed Feeds, and Newest feeds…there isn’t a user search, once you find a feed, then you can click to see that users space.

Also I just noticed when you view a user space, see Jeroen (the man behind FeedXS, I think)…you can add this user to your Friends List…the friends tab is in your profile, you can search users as well.

Another thing is you can post to your feed via MSN.

One of Jeroen’s posts sums this up:
“The idea is simple: why do only websites have feeds, and not people? With FeedXS.com, we give people their own feed. Easy to create, easy to maintain…”

Sum up

Create multiple feeds (like generic blogs)
Each generic blog (text space) as an RSS feed
Each post has a permalink (no comments)
Copy other people’s posts
Only the owner can see all their feeds as a river of news
Post from MSN
Collect feeds in My Subscriptions tab
Collect users in My Friends tab
Search both feeds and users
All in a folksonomy

I know there are the note tools mentioned here, as well as webnote, or other to-do shopping type notepads that have feeds, but this allows you to have as many feeds as you like (a collection of simple blogs), and it is presented so well!

My idea would be to re-syndicate this to the sidebar of your blog as a kind of side blog…I could easily do this via another blog, but I don’t want to set up a whole blog just for some simple notes, this tool does the job specifically.

Another way to have a sideblog is via an OPML outliner, which you can then host on your sidebar in a tool such as OPod or Bitty.

1 Comment »

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  1. FeedXS is nice John but I have to say I’m surprised at how it has captured the imagination compared with Nooked.com FeedWizard which has been on the market for over a year now and seems much more capable. I believe Nooked are due to release version 2 shortly and it will have some major new features. I’ve come across a few other products with the same idea too, one of which is -

    http://www.linkrss.com/

    What I’d like is an email, SMS (text message) and MMS (mobile multimedia message) gateway in these tools to allow one to publish a feed from anywhere. Imagine being ‘in the field’ and publishing your MMS video directly to an RSS feed.

    I agree that these are very important services in the sense that they separate the feed from the blog and are the harbinger of RSS-everywhere in the age of Blogjects. This is why I feel we’ll ultimately have no choice but to swap our feed aggregators for feed grazers - such will be the feed inundation.

    Comment by James Corbett — March 10, 2006 @ 8:44 am

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