Library clips

Can’t wait for Blurb’s Blog Book, turn your blog into a book…a must for the geek coffee table collection.

I wonder if you will be able to create a book with posts from just one blog category, eg. Library clips - The OPML Collection 2006…or combine a few categories like, OPML, RSS, blogs, wiki, tags, eg. Library clips - The Read/Write Web 2006…or just a selection of posts, eg. Library clips - The best of the Read/Write Web 2006.

What about grabbing posts from within the OPML category of several blogs you like…if they don’t have an OPML category, maybe posts from an OPML search result (but then you’d have to scan this to make sure all the posts are about OPML), eg. My OPML Reading List 2006…but you’d have to be careful with copyright, this isn’t re-syndication, this is re-publishing.

You could also decide to get involved and publish commentary before each blog post if you like…a touch of authoring to gently guide the person as they read the book.

And how would the book flow, if you had content from 5 blogs, would it be a blog at a time, would it be mixed in date order (river of news), would it be the most popular posts first, or would you really get involved and order it the way you see fit.

Another thing is that some times blog content doesn’t cross over well in the print world because instead of explaining the context of something or showing an example, you can just use hyperlinks, eg. see more…actually I do have more on this, why bother explaining it further when I can just hyperlink to it (see the last 2 paragraphs).

Related to this, next to each hyperlink in the body of a post I would like to see a number, and a footnote at the end of the page…see more about this.

Lastly what about an e-book version you can download…the idea is similar to webaroo (not really).
Just say you make a collection of blogs into an e-book, even a type of text book…you could have a hyperlinked table of contents, or a word burst cloud (machine generated tag cloud), etc…

The e-book would also have the webpages you link to from the body of your blog posts, but then what about the posts linked to by these posts…how deep will the linking go.

For this example let’s continue with the e-book about the topic “OPML”, from several blogs, where the content is only from the OPML categories of these blogs.

Let’s say an indexed post is Level 1, and any post it links to is Level 2 (a Level 2 post is only in the e-book because a Level 1 post is linking to it)…if the Level 1 post links to an external blog (ie. a blog not featured in the e-book), then the hyperlinks in the body of this external blog post will be greyed out…you have to stop somewhere with the offline experience.
The problem is that just say the Level 1 post links to another off-topic post from a Level 1 blog (including itself), the reader will have a hard time thinking why the hyperlinks are greyed out since it is a Level 1 blog…the reason is that even though it is a Level 1 blog, it is not a Level 1 post (ie. it may be off-topic).
Actually, there is a chance not all the hyperlinks will be greyed out, unless one of the hyperlinks points to a Level 1 post.

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Picaboo
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