Library clips

Feed Collectors is almost the same as Pulverati, I think it’s by the same people…Feed Collectors displays the data in more ways and also supplies OPML.

Features

Create a Collection (river of news)…soon all users will be able to create multiple collections.

A collection comprises of a Watchlist (river of news), Feeds page, Friends page, and Profile.

He is a user space, the default page is the All Collections Watchlist…you can change this view to see just one collection from this user.

Also change the view to see content from just one source feed…this drop down lists all your source feeds from all your collections.

See content by date, sort by newest, most relevant, or most popular…also view content by top topics, these must be the categories/tags used by the source feeds.

When you view the Watchlist (river of news) notice that you can click on a category/topic to see contents from just that category/topic, or just from that source feed, or even just from that author from the source feeds (handy for multi-authored blogs).

You can also comment and rate each post.

Even though your Watchlist displays an excerpt for each result it will search the full-text of each item
…you can also set up all your filters and limits and then enter a search term.
NOTE: it will also play items.

The feeds also keep up with your meanderings, when ever you filter or search it will generate a unique feed.

Next is the Feeds section, here you can choose a collection from a drop down menu, this will show all the feeds in this collection, and more…it would be good if it promoted the spliced feed.

Another issue is that the OPML Reading List is defaulted for All Collections, I’d like a separate Reading List for each collection.

Next is the Friends section, collect links to other user spaces, and more…even has a feed.

Lastly is the Profile page.

Here is the collections page, notice when you make a collection you assign tags, so basically you can discover a Spliced feed/River of News/Reading List by tag…nice!
It would be good if this page promoted the spliced feed, Reading List, and User for each collection.

The homepage lists Popular Collection Topics, and Top Collection Tags…these are both the same thing, and they are not limited to the tag field, it is just a search query in the collection title, description and tag fields…using the search box does the same thing.

I like the idea of displaying Most Popular Feeds from Collections, they could almost make a seperate source feed folksonomy section which aggregates all the source feeds people have used in their collections.
For this to work you’d need to not only apply tags to each collection, but also to each feed in each collection…may confuse things a bit but it offers people a directory/folksonsomy to find feeds in order to use in their collections.

I really like the many ways you can filter your Watchlist, the search function and river of news features are awesome…although I’d like to filter a collection or a feed in a collection when I’m creating the collection.

So far feedbite and Feed Collectors are the current Reading List folksonomies, with Pulverati, Kinja, and OPML Factory close behind…more.

Feed Collectors has some great potential as it is very social and has powerful content displays, I only wish the social aspect was closer to del.icio.us…some say del.icio.us is very simple, but this is just what I like about it.

[ADDED 1/05/06: Is a Reading List folksonomy appropriate?]

Smarking is a low scale social bookmark service built ny an Italian computer student…it’s got some great features.

See the latest, most popular, or most rated bookmarks, search or browse tags via the tag cloud.

Bookmark info page

Each bookmark can be rated and commented on (a bookmark has a permalink but not for each user, just a general permalink, usually labelled “? people bookmarked this page”).

Here’s an example of a bookmark info page, notice you can preview the actual website you are bookmarking in a scroll window.

From this page, view related sites and sites that link to the bookmark via Google “related:”, and “link:” syntax.

View descriptions, tags and comments assigned by users who have bookmarked this page.

Lastly you can link to each user account who has bookmark this page
…if you hover the mouse over the link there are plenty of action choices.

User space

Here’s an example of a user space.

NOTE: Notice the comments link also goes to the bookmark info page.

If you hover over a tag you can launch to that tag page in other tag services…great for external discovery.

Each user also has a profile page
- relationships (more specific than friends)
- friends (make a list of friends)
- similars users
- neighbours (geographic, I think)

If you hover over any user name one of the choices is to send that user a message.

Search

Search in the tile, description and tag fields in one go…this is keyword search
…also search for a keyword limited to certain tags.

The results page lists related tags.

Same search is available at the user level, but the tag field is a drop down menu.

You can even subscribe to bookmarks from 2 users as well as specifying the tags from both these users
NOTE: both users have to have these tags…I suppose if one of the users didn’t have one of these tags it would just be ignored.
eg. http://smarking.com/?mode=rss&users=John,Mary&tags=cooking,science fiction

Smarking is very similar in functionality to del.icio.us, there are even some unique features, and the search is clean, direct and intuitive.

The wiki lists the features, also see the blog for updates.

Feedbite has finally become a Reading List Folksonomy with the implementation of dynamic OPML for each bundle (spliced feed river of news).

It’s not quite a folksonomy, in the del.icio.us way, but it’s getting there…

Briefly
- Create spliced feeds (bundle)…make as many as you like
- Filter a bundle with a keyword
- OPML for each bundle
- View a river of news (of bundle) or view content by just one of the source feeds…but you can’t search in one feed
- Collect bundles…even clone a bundle
- Search a bundle…search all Feedbite bundles, and more (includes fielded search)…you can’t search just in all your bundles…you can’t generate search feeds
- Tag the bundles…this makes it a folksonomy for Reading Lists (view a user space, community tag cloud and related tags)
- Create a feed…each feed has a space just like a source feed (this means it is a content-only blog, also has permalinks)
- Re-syndicate a bundle

The updates are mentioned here:

Permalinks for bundle items (this also applies to each item in a custom feed)
- these custom feeds are pretty much a pure content-only blog

Related tags in the search results
- each bundle that appear in a search result shows the tags assigned (these are applied when the bundle is first created and can be changed in the bundle admin page)

The problem at the moment is that these tags are yet to be hyperlinked
…anyway the tags from each bundle as displayed in a search result, are aggregated and displayed as related tags for further discovery (these are hyperlinked).

Here’s a result for the search term blog…notice bundles are still appearing even if they are not tagged “blog”…as it searches in both the title and tag fields.

On the home page they have also included a tag cloud, but again it is more of a search cloud…although, even if that term appears in a bundle title there will be a good chance that it is describing the bundle even if it isn’t tagged with that term.
The advanced search doesn’t seem to have a tag field.

When you look at a bundle like Web2.0 blogs, you’ll notice the tags are displayed in the “About this bundle:” heading, but again they are not hyperlinked, hopefully this will be rectified…this also goes with the “Saved by:” n users (this could link to a page displaying a list of users).
NOTE: if you save a bundle you cannot add your own tags to it…but, you can clone a bundle

It would be good to also see related tags to this bundle, ie. all the other bundles that have tags in common with this bundle.

Another thing I noticed is that if I click on the archive link of a source feed in a bundle, then I have no way of getting back to the bundle home page except the browser back button.

Friends section allows you to collect users, the same as you can collect bundles…you can also send messages.

Lastly, all bundles have a unique OPML Reading List, check ‘em out:
Search in all bundles for the term blog
Browse all the bundles from one user…I’d like to see all tags from one user aggregated in a tagcloud.

You can export all the feeds from all bundles (your collection - saved and created) in one go in the My Bundles section, but this isn’t a dynamic OPML, if it was you could also feature it in the public user page

…you can import an OPML file only, not an OPML URL.

I also noticed in the My Bundles section that it doesn’t list the OPML of each bundle, or the user, or the tags.

I’m not being harsh, I’m just giving constructive feedback…I think Feedbite is offering something very unique, it is combining a lot of things in the one service without being too confusing.

It could also offer a source feed folksonomy, but this may confuse…it could also offer to subscribe/read feeds in your My Bundles section, or even subscribe to an OPML Reading List, but only if they exist within Feedbite.

Try it out for yourself, the more feedback the better it gets…that’s the web2.0 way…and maybe the richer it gets (I’m talking money).

Here are my other posts on Feedbite (which I will have to update):
Feedbite : Newsmaster folksonomy
feedbite : nearly a Reading List folksonomy
Reading List folksonomy

[ADDED 1/05/06: Is a Reading List folksonomy appropriate?]

A while back I posted on the idea of an RSS newspaper, similar to the process of an RSS Reader, only you read the contents as a print newspaper layout instead of the email cloned 2 or 3 pane layout.

So far OPML2PDF is the first step, but this is just a PDF RSS Reader, with the bonus of handy printing out the latest posts.
Then myBroadSheet came up with a working model, but this is a work in progress as Chris Saad is busy on Touchstone…if there are any flash animators interested send Chris an email.

Now there is a new comer RSS Star, to be released soon (inspired by a development competition)…can’t wait, I think this has some potential, especially as a daily newspaper print out for the enterprise (either as an e-book type thing or as an actual print out newspaper style, maybe advertisements and all).

My idea was to load in your OPML, categorise the feeds in folders, then supply some interest keywords…the folders will be the sections of your newspaper, the keywords based on text analysis along with incoming link popularity will decide which posts are the larger editorials including the front page story.

Eg. grab lots of feeds and keep them in folders like Politics, Sport, Finance, Technology, Entertainment, Classifieds (edgeio), Weather (RSS Weather), Events (RSS Calendar), Employment (RSS Jobs), etc…there are feeds for all types of content and data these days.

Then within each folder list some keywords, so if you list the term “folksonomy” in the Technology folder, any posts about folksonomies will get a bigger editorial…but if a post is about “folksonomies” but isn’t lengthy this may prevent it from elevating to a bigger editorial.
Also if there is a post about “Wiki’s” with 30 incoming links leaving the other posts for dead, well then this may be a bigger editorial piece even though it is not one of your keywords.

I’ve posted lots of times on Talk Digger.
Simply type in a URL and it will show posts linking to it from various search engines, even generate an RSS feed, use it as a bookmarklet, put it in your post template…you can select from various engines (great for generating a Bloglines citation feed)…it will even de-dupe links.

You can do link searches at Technorati and other engines, then splice them together or just use Talk Digger.

Fred has noticed that some people have been bookmarking URL searches in del.icio.us…this is going further by bookmarking a webpage and the conversational webpages linking to it. But I suppose this is not to different than bookmarking a Technorati link search, only it is a meta-search.

He is now taking it towards the community and conversational arena, from the post:

“…I intend to create a community infrastructure, in order to:

Help people to easily track conversations.
Help people to find interesting conversations.
Finally, I plan to create an infrastructure that lets people easily enter into a discussion they have found using Talk Digger.”

From his latest post:

“As you probably know, Talk Digger is: a new way to find, follow and join discussions evolving on the Web. So you have three elements: (1) finding discussions, (2) following discussions and (3) joining discussions.

With these new features, Talk Digger will become a social platform that helps people to connect with other people that follow the same stories (the premise here is that people that follow the same discussions will also have some personal and professional interests in common). It will also become a search engine of its own, and not only a meta-one.”

Check out the screenshots:
Result page of conversations
A single conversation page.

It seems we will be able to tag discussions (link searches) within Talk Digger itself, so now others can browse the tags to find various discussions under a tag…our personal endeavours aggregate to social greatness…this is such a great idea, BlogPulse could of done this ages ago with its conversation tracker.

A single conversation page displays the conversation in full, with tags, the users who have bookmarked it, the users interests, and a comments form…you can also give a title and description of your bookmark.

This is very clever, first Talk Digger was just re-displaying various search engine link searches on the one page, but now it is allowing users to organise a search result into a folksonomy.
When users bookmark a search result (a conversation) they will give it a title, description and tags…this data will eventually go from just browsing to searching as well.

In the future I can see searching for conversations with a given tag (browse tags for now), search for terms in the tile and descriptions of bookmarked conversations…this will extend it into a human indexed conversation search engine.

Conversational List folksonomy

Something I’d like to do is manually piece together a conversation, bookmark it, tag it, and point to it
…something I was trying to explain in, Distributed conversations: pinging and tagging.
Kind of like a list folksonomy, like H20, but all you do is enter in a heap of links on a page, then tag that page, this page has a permalink so you can point to it.

The difference here is the you are manually constructing the conversation, whereas in Talk Digger the conversation in based on who’s linking to a post. The good thing about Talk Digger is that the RSS feed of a conversational bookmark will keep you up-to-date with the latest additions to a conversation.
But then again a manually constructed bookmark folksonomy can still have a feed for each conversation, if you want to add a new link to one of your bookmarked discussions, just open up the page and add the link to the bottom, the feed will inform us you have added a new link to the discussion.

In both types of conversation folksonomies you could also follow feeds for tags, if you follow the tag “opml” you will be alerted when someone has added a new conversation to the folksonomy and tagged it “opml”.

Once again, this is a great idea, a conversational bookmark folksonomy…with social networking features (user interests, user account).