Library clips

MyToday is the latest newsmastering tool, but at the moment you can’t make your own.

To take part send in an OPML or set of feeds so a Daily can be created…I assume you will be able to do this yourself in the future.

The Dailies created so far have been categorised into sections.

What this has over other newsmastering tools is that you can organise your Daily into topics…besides this MyToday has a long way to go…seems like a great start so far.

Actually reading the content is not a river of news, so this makes it different reading than services like Blogdigger Groups, MySyndicaat, SuprGlu, etc…

What you see in a Daily is a set of boxes, each box is a topic containing a subscription set of feeds, when you click on a feed title it expands to show the latest posts.

The top bar allows you to click recent, a calendar, expand/collapse topics, and the OPML Reading List (this is the only one besides Blogdigger Groups and MySyndicaat that generates an OPML URL).

This type of newsmastering has more in common with the widget presentation of 24eyes, fyuze, etamp, etc…

Of course you could try Bozpages to see all the views: river of news, widget, tagcloud.

One of my posts got me thinking about a new newsmastering concept…a daily newspaper for you to print or read as an e-book.

You enter a feed set, you enter some attention data, well maybe some keywords you are interested in…NOTE: you are not filtering feeds to only see posts with those keywords (you could if you wanted to I guess).

So here is my:

- OPML Reading List of 50 feeds
- Keywords/interests eg. opml, reading list, rss, rss readers, tags, folksonomy, bookmarks
- Keywords/dis-interests eg. PR, voip, microsoft (these are just made up for the moment)

Now generate me a daily newspaper, where I will see all posts from all feeds
…the box size of the story, and the page it is on will depend on my keywords.

Or maybe you can make sections for the newspaper based on these keywords, or make sections based on a set of feeds…if one of your feeds was from edgeio you’d have a classifieds section.

Then take it further than personal use, and give it a URL, a public space where someone can read your newspaper…maybe in an e-book client or maybe the reader is built into the newspaper (all you need in a web browser).

For the e-newspaper version you could have memetracking links to see related discussion.

Also make money from it by putting ads in there, then it would really look like a print newspaper, but based on your interests.

I guess there are issues with copyright, but then re-syndicating RSS content is kind of like that isn’t it…the moment you started selling a print version of your own newspaper, then people would start to get serious about RSS copyright.

All this is doing is taking the newsmastering concept and displaying your content in a print newspaper format instead of a river of news.

One thing I didn’t think of is that the feeds I track are mainly blog feeds, and blog posts have lots of hyperlinks in the body of the post…bloggers rely on you launching to these hyperlinks to understand the current blog post, and sometimes the label under the hyperlink says “see more” or “see here”, which doesn’t help with context if you can’t click on it as in the print environment…more.

We have to remember feed content isn’t written for the print format, so there is a chance it may not cross over well in the print world…sure a print out of a blog post in one thing, but creating a whole newspaper on this concept is getting serious.

Continue…

If someone does a inurl search of your blog at a search engine they will see all your posts, this type of search is almost like an abstract index of your recent posts…if someone were to click on an advertisement (the type of ad was based on your content, so it was attractive to the user), the search engine reaps the benefits, but that’s OK as they are a search engine first and not a media or news delivery site.
(this is both for normal web and blog engines)

If you just search all articles from a newspaper at a news site, and someone clicks on an ad, then this is OK as the news engine has paid for the rights to re-publish the story in the first place.

I guess blog engines are a cross between news and web engines, they get away without having to ask bloggers if it is OK to use their content as it is similar to a web engine, but blogs can also be used for news.

Now what about homemade newsmastering portals, now this is where it becomes a bit dicey…it is easy to re-syndicate many feeds into your own news portal, you can also view all posts by one feed…see Feeds4all (also see Informatory and Newspage, but this is OK in this case as I’m familiar with the person).

Now if someone clicks on an ad whilst viewing this page, my blog doesn’t get any money as I’m not explicitly affiliated, yet it is my content, and if my content were not there, they would be not clicking on ads, therefore no money…so this is the type of thing that will happen when homemade newsmastering sites enable you to include advertising, eg.RSS@PAGE.
But you can do it yourself anyway with your own platform, using FeedWordPress or simply re-syndicate stuff into a blog (RSS2HTML), and whack in ads on the sidebar.

If there were no ads, then I don’t mind being re-syndicated, depending on the context of the portal, but if people are going to go that step further and turn their newsmastering into a commercial thing then maybe I should be involved.

Another question, what happens if the portal is fed by search feeds, this then is too hard to monitor….

At least Corante Web Hub have asked for my permission, and will give me a cut of the takings.

Anyhow as long as we do ego feeds we will see where we are being re-syndicated, and if anyone is making money from our content…and I’m all for newsmastering and re-syndication, it’s just when it is packaged into a professional portal is starts making a bigger difference and impact…tools like Blogdigger Groups, RSSmix, kickRSS, SuprGlu, MySyndicaat, and the rest are all host based so this type of thing is more unlikely to happen, also they have more of a generic look.

I suppose the popularity of the portal is the poison, if I’m not happy being in affiliated with the portal but it doesn’t get many visits who cares no-one will know, but if it is very popular then you will be defined by this affiliation…same goes with compensation, you’re not going to get much from low traffic portals, but popular portals then seem a window of opportunity for some money.

The good thing in the end is that, the more you are linked to, the higher your PageRank, and the more chance of people visiting your site to click on your ads (if you have any).

Some other pages I’ve seen my blog re-syndicated:

Feedshow (this is a personal RSS reader where you can have a public version of a feed, sort of like Bloglines…only you can include ads…on second look the author of the feed has to include the ads…what if it is a synthetic spliced feed, this means you can include ads on mixed feed content that is not really yours).

Gas (this doesn’t have ads)

You could easily splice just one feed, or a few and re-syndicate it RSS to HTML into a blog that has ads.

Here is a sample post of mine re-syndicated in a professional newsmastering tool called reBlogger, this Public RSS Reader created with reBlogger is called SEO Data.
It is so professional, it re-syndicates full-text, but if you want to leave a comment it points to the native post…at the top of this post is states the blogger (me) and a link to my blog, as well as the category my blog belongs in SEO Data, and an index of my posts by date, (this doesn’t have ads).