Library clips

Thanks to Adam Green (an OPML advocate), Library clips is being re-syndicated at Top 10 Sources.
Adam’s group of 10 blogs are under the topic of OPML…here is the spliced feed, here is the OPML Reading List, and here is the OPML Link List.

Note
OPML Reading List - the 10 items are the 10 blog feeds
OPML Link List - the 10 items are the blog homepages (plus it also has the latest posts/permalinks from each blog)

How does the OPML Link List show the latest posts, similar to the way the OPML Reading List does?
Actually, the items in the OPML Reading List are just the feed URL’s, you only see the posts by using it in an OPML Reader…whereas the OPML Link List has the latest posts within the raw OPML.

Actually, the latest posts are seen in the OPML Link List as they are cached, this is a bit techie for my understanding…see an earlier post for some background to these thoughts.

Since most OPML Browsers can now also read and play feed content, do we still need the OPML Link List?
…especially that you can also subscribe to an OPML Reading List in your RSS Reader.

Sidenote
To get an OPML archive of the current and past posts of a blog, the blog itself would need an OPML…how does Top 10 Sources do it, and why isn’t it an archive?

OPML Link Lists vs. RSS

If you could make an OPML from a del.icio.us tag (where the bookmarks in the tag are just normal HTML links), this OPML would show a whole archive of all your bookmarks within that tag. You could use Grazr or Bitty Browser to host this archive on your blog sidebar, and when ever you add a bookmark to your del.icio.us tag it will automagically appear in your sidebar collection…a portable del.icio.us that is always up-to-date.

Or you could view the OPML Link List at an OPML Browser/Reader like Optimal, Opod, Grazr or Bitty.

You might want to do this for your whole del.icio.us collection, so you’d have a mini version of your del.icio.us account in neat folders right there in your blog.

Now with RSS you can re-syndicate the contents of a del.icio.us tag to your blog sidebar, this will show the latest items from that feed, but it won’t archive them all, it just shows the latest, when newer items appear the older ones drop off.
If you have a whole heap of del.icio.us tags, you could take the feed from each one and make a Reading List, and put this on the sidebar of your blog, but still older items are replaced by newer items.

So an OPML Link List will be an archive for the del.icio.us tag, whereas the RSS feed of the del.icio.us tag won’t be, unless it set no limits like FeedCatch.

The OPML of a del.icio.us tag will allow you to exchange and dump data into other applications (it’s a container format).
My question is can the RSS of a del.icio.us tag do a similar thing…sure I can re-syndicate items, but I don’t get an archive…is RSS a container for all the content, I see OPML as a container to hold all the content?

More

To know more about this portal, see my post, Top 10 Sources: Newsmasters paradise

Here is an OPML outline of whole portal…thanks Bela.

Here is the raw OPML Reading List…see it in Optimal (this also reads the feeds in the same page unlike the OPML Workstation outline).

A while ago I posted on how services like Edgeio can aggregate tagged blogposts or tagged URL’s and include this data into their service…as long as these tagged posts or object use the microformat rel=tag.

What if a service aggregates data from objects with the tag “apple”, it may be a service listing Apple computers…then what if another service starts, and also aggregates data from objects with the tag “apple”, but this service is a listing for peoples experiences with the fruit apple.
These services may not know about each other, thus they are creating noise for each other…I guess this is the difference between the publisher explicitly submitting a post rather than the service collecting posts on their own.

Maybe service one has to broadcast to the blogosphere to use the tag “applecomputer” instead…if a service like Edgeio starts up, it is essential they need to tell everyone what tag names they aggregate, and hope that other services don’t come along and try to advocate the same tag, especially if they are about a different topic or type of service.

If another classified services start up they can just aggregate the “listing” tag also, this is also handy for publishers as their posts will appear on multiple boards at the same time.

But if a new service started that aren’t about classifieds but chose to use the “listing” tag…if they generated enough popularity, people would tag their posts “listing” in order to appear on this new service. The repercussions are that Edgeio will now get posts tagged “listing” but the content may have nothing to do with their service…so there has to be a greater quality control filter.
(And also this new service will get all posts tagged “listing” that were intended to appear at Edgeio).

So are these microformat tags going to one day start clashing, due to the harnessing the bottom up approach?
Will a more defined approach such as structured blogging be more appropriate.

Maybe there is more to this, not sure…

Check out Alex Barnett’s latest podcast on microformat’s…I’m yet to listen to this.

Yutter seems to be a new player in the RSS to email market…although I think FeedBlitz has this under control.