Library clips

A little while ago I caught Rojo playing with search, well now I think it’s ready, as you can search stories…what about searching just my rojo, just my tags (saved stories), saved (flagged, mojo’d, read), you get what I mean.

And what about searching in a feed tag, or even just one feed, I’d like that…and limiting it to read/unread…or searching just in the title field.
My Rojo is my world, just like my social bookmarks (I don’t really use this module in Rojo), so to be able to search to the granular level in these services is essential.

Another thing is that you can now submit a story, that is mojo any webpage via a bookmarklet…wow, Rojo is a:
- feed reader
- social bookmark service
- memetracker (well not really, just relevance sorting…it doesn’t cluster stories and discussion)
- memedigger
- recommendation service

Even put a button on your blog, what about for each blog post, kind of like Digg It.

Looks like search is sticking, they have posted about it.

The OPML Feed Roller is just getting better, now you can make search feeds from various news engines at the same time.

Actually this is a separate service, it is the Persistent News Search OPML Feedroll Generator, the earlier service is the Social Bookmarking RSS Feeds - OPML Generator

…maybe both these services could be merged into one.

I just noticed if you make several profiles, that is, numerous OPML’s, you can also roll (merge) to make a longer OPML…but you only get the code for this you don’t get a new URL.
When you do this maybe it it could make a mother OPML URL, where all the individual OPML’s are “inclusions”.
Same goes with the bookmark roller.

gada.be offers meta-searching…enter a search term, select a field (eg. blogs, social, news), and it will display the latest posts from each engine, and an RSS feed for each engine (but not a spliced feed). Then click on OPML, and you will get an OPML URL, pretty nifty, especially that it also displays search results.

Gee, TalkDigger could offer OPML for a search, only difference is that the engines are mixed (blogs, web, etc…)
…but, you can do link searches, imagine getting an ego link search OPML.

I have a TalkDigger link search for every blog post, look for this icon …clicking on this will take you to TalkDigger, but imagine that it could all be displayed in your blog via a OPML grazr…see more.

Kebberfegg is similar to the OPML Feed Rollers, like gada.be it does meta-searching, only the OPML isn’t unique.

MonitorThis also does the same thing…I even like that you can open it in an OPML Browser…it generates an OPML code in order to save as a file of you can click “open file in web browser” for the OPML URL.

In the future perhaps we can login to see our saved OPML Feed Rolls, even tag them if we have load of them.

The other day I posted on printing blog posts, and have some more to say.

Today I came across a blog that had heaps of posts I was interested in, so I wanted to get acquainted with this blog, so I went through the categories and went through the date archives…there was so much good stuff
(too much to read online, print format is easier on the eyes and good for the train ride home).

The homepage had about 10 posts, so I tried printing it, but it didn’t print well, so RSS2PDF or HTML2PDF fixed that up.

But then my next problem was that I had to page to see the next 10 posts and print again, now you can’t do this with RSS2PDF as it only shows the last 10 posts, if there was RSS archiving then it would be OK.

So I clicked to the next page, got the URL and entered it in HTML2PDF and did a print, then clicked to the next page of posts, entered that address into HTML2PDF and did a print, and so on.

I was thinking would this be much easier if I could just set a page range…eg. print me all posts from page1-5

…and even apply this to a tag or a category, enter a category URL and print from page1-5
…or even a full post search result.

Then the other thing is that you have to read from the last page to the front page, and you have to read from the bottom of the page up…a totally inconvenient experience.

What blogs need are a reverse button, from the homepage you could read a blog from the first post downwards, and click to the next page, you could choose a month or date URL and read it in (non-reverse) chronological order, or choose a category URL and do the same
…this is a problem as well in RSS Readers, if you haven’t read a feed in a while you may need to read an earlier post to make sense of the current post.

Don’t you hate it, when you reply to a comment someone left on your blog, that you are not sure if they are going to see this reply.
Will they remember to come back, did they subscribe to the RSS comment post feed, did they tick the email notification box (my blog doesn’t have this), did they use any method to track comments they have made.

What I try to do is reply in the post so the discussion is centralised, but I will also email the person to tell them I have responded.
Wouldn’t it be good if I could ping that person automatically, when I submit a new comment to the blog post.

Most blogs have trackback which is ideal for this, but there is only a trackback for posts, what about a homepage trackback of some sort…if I could trackback the person in my reply comment then I would be more confident they will be notified of my reply.
Maybe a comments box needs a trackback field, I guess you could just link to the person’s homepage in the body of the comment and hope they check their ego feeds, but even then, the blog engimes won’t pick this up as there is no real comments engine.

Maybe a comment can have an email field, that way when you leave a comment you can email it to people at the same time, kind of like email a friend for a comment…this way you will be sure the person knows you have replied.
I mean, you often have email this post (from a blog or even from within an RSS Reader), so why not email this comment, but for it to happen at the same time you publish it…just like you trackback at the time of publishing.

That’s it, leaving a comment on a blog post can be just like sending an email…and if you don’t want to fill in the email field, you don’t have to, just publish the comment as usual.
If you are leaving the 15th comment and want to reply to commentor number 5, you can have that email address in the attention field, and all the rest of the commentors email automatically in the cc: field, or just a few in the cc: field, or none at all in the cc: field.

Actually this might have spam issues, pushing isn’t in vogue, people need to look after themselves and pull content.

A post of mine called 10 reasons why blogs are better than email is an excerpt from an earlier blog post called Internal communication blogs and km2.0…this post was long and jammed packed with stuff, it didn’t have a real specific focus, but some posts are like that sometimes.

Anyway, it got no comments, one incoming link, and was bookmarked 8 times in del.icio.us…not a good strike rate. It got me thinking that people might not have time to read long posts, and decide to skip reading it all together, or they may decide to read it when they have time but forget to do so.

It may seem that shorter blog posts are best, as they will get read, attention is not just about content that matches your interests or time, it can even be about content (and the length of the content) at a specific point in time, ie. you may be interested but not right now, as it will take too long to read, I’ll read it later.
Hopefully this person will have good personal information management skills, otherwise the post will be forgotten about.

So considering all this, it may seem that shorter blog posts, or even blog posts that stick to a focused narrow topic may be best.
I’m not talking a link blog…but it just seems essay type posts just may not get read, whereas in a journal you are prepared for longer pieces, but in a blog you just want to know the latest and quick, because there is lots more to get through.

Also the title of the newer post is more provocative, more catchy (I have the terms blogs and email, this will appear in more search feeds…also my previous title had the term km2.0, I could of separated these or used the term knowledge management).

In closing the newer title is more catchy and the content matches the title perfectly…it is a shorter post, and to the point.

Let’s see how it does in comparison.

1. Avoid broadcast emails that don’t concern you (instead you can subscribe to the blog - RSS or email, choosing what is sent to you…push vs. pull)

2. Using blog posts instead of emails allows these communications to be stored in a central repository, instead of lost in silos.

3. Each post has a permalink, and you can use comments to discuss (otherwise people may email reply to select people, leaving others to miss out on the discussion).

4. Browse by author, date, month, category, tag…it’s a database I suppose…also full-text search.
Categories/tags provide some sort of context when browsing, and post title is similar to an email subject line.
(I’m yet to see fielded search on a blog, ie. search in the title, author, category, tag, date, etc…)

5. Besides publishing, organising, subscription, notifying, and storing searchable communications in the one go, the blog can also act as a portal by displaying stuff on the sidebar.

6. A new staff member can easily catch the gist of what’s going on by reading the blog, and checking out the links on the sidebar.
People outside the business unit can get a glimpse into the going ons of another business unit…even subscribe
(you may be interested in changing jobs within the same firm, by viewing and/or subscribing to a business unit blog you can get an idea of what’s going on).
Everyone can author the blog, anyone can view the blog.

7. Re-syndicate the contents of the blog to different sections of the intranet, or wherever…people can read your contents; at your blog, in an RSS Reader, in an email client, RSS to IM, RSS to SMS, desktop ticker, menu or browser or system tray reader, desktop widget, or at a website that re-syndicates the contents…also as a an intranet search result.

8. Since it is a simple publishing platform, it may encourage the sharing of tacit knowledge.

9. Since this information is centralised for people to view, it may avoid re-inventing the wheel, or a related business unit may borrow concepts from another business unit, leading to innovations.

10. The idea of stuctured blogging and datablogging enable you to aggregate data from fields in blog posts, even generate tables, graphs, statistics, etc…

Attention : Long or short blog posts

Earlier I posted on how del.icio.us recently split up the contents type of the inbox…the inbox is now for tag subscriptions, and the “your network” is for user subscriptions…makes sense.

Well now, if you go to “your network“, you will see a section on the sidebar called “your fans“.

These are people who have you in their network (you can set your network to private, so no-one can see which users you subscribe to).

I was pleased to see that I have over 20 fans…these people must like my link stream…glad to be of service.
I’m doing it for myself anyway, what not let others peer over my shoulder and capitalise on the rewards of my efforts.

If my fans like my stuff, there’s a good chance I’ll like their stuff, so off I go clicking on these users to see what they’ve got.

Now that I’m directly driven to view the accounts of my fans, I want to view other user accounts…hmmm, I’d love to search by a user field.

At the moment the search doesn’t specify fields (I think it searches in the title, tag, and comments field combined).

Check out Simpy and RawSugar for fielded searching, even combining them.

Feedback

I’d like to make bundle headings for my “your network section”, and also for the “your fans” section, not only that but I’d like these bundle headings to be clickable just like in the “inbox” section.

If you click on a bundle heading from the “inbox” (your tag subscriptions), you will just see a portion of the content from your whole inbox.
I’d even like to click on one subscription within a bundle from my inbox, and see the contents from just that subscription, at the moment if you do this it will just launch to that tag page, if you want to choose another tag from your inbox you have to use the back button to get back to your inbox.

Now how about our “tag bundles” headings (the user home page) being clickable hyperlinks, I’d love to see only bookmarks from tags within a tag bundle…RawSugar has this feature.

To go one step further, I’d like to do a search query within one of my inbox bundles or across my whole inbox, and for it to generate a feed that I can subscribe to in my inbox…Simpy has this feature.

Export Internet Explorer favourites to an OPML file…simple as that.

NOTE: this is a download, and it exports a file not a URL.

Feedpass is the lastest and the best RSS landing page so far.

The Feedburner landing page offers a few RSS Readers, and start pages to choose from…compare this to the myriad of choices at Feedpass (at the moment they offer 56 RSS Readers).

The choices are: RSS readers, email, start pages, browsers, or manually…you can also save individual posts in your favourite bookmark service.

Everyway of subscribing has an explanation…very informative…and you can even earn money if people click on the ads on the landing page
…anymore features on this landing page and it would lose focus.

See more.

[ADDED: I forgot to mention they provide code for buttons, auto-discovery, and you can claim your feed…not sure how to do this…I think this will display other features like statistics]