Feedbite : Reading List folksonomy
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?]
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Not this is not folksonomy, but tagging. This is straight tagging, nothing more.
Comment by vanderwal — April 29, 2006 @ 1:37 pm
Thomas,
At the moment in feedbite you can tag your Reading List, but this is not hyperlinked yet…so soon we can discover Reading Lists by author tags like in Feed Collectors…maybe you are right these are author tags, not community tags, therefore not a folksonomy.
If you browsed Feedbite or Feed Collectors and decided to save a Reading List (created by someone else), you can’t tag it yourself, you have to keep the tags that the author of the Reading List created. (I don’t think Kinja allows you to save Reading Lists created by others).
NOTE: Feed Collectors has a friends section, all you can do is save link to the user space, that’s it, you can’t save just a collection, and if you could…you wouldn’t be able to re-tag it.
Although I kind of see it inbetween, even though users are not tagging content - indeed the authors of the Reading List are doing the tagging - so the vocabulary is not defined by the host but by the people that contribute Reading Lists (which are kind of users in a way)
…but I do understand that it is not a full-fledged folksonomy, and others cannot re-tag other peoples Reading Lists.
So in essence the community is not tagging an evolving vocabulary.
Comment by Johnt — May 1, 2006 @ 2:18 am