Library clips

Alertbear is a similar idea to newsplorer, an RSS Reader that sits in your systems tray, very easy access, also has a pop-up notifier.

It seems to be a mini RSS Reader, but I’d like to use it with my Rojo OPML just for the pop-up notifier feature.

Anyway, from this image you can see how it basically works..from the website:

“The Stack appears whenever a feed contains new items, visibly showing you them being added to the top. You can scroll up and down it, see unread items by their cream colour and star icon, assign colours to your feed categories to make them easier to spot, click the arrow icon on each item to see expanded information, navigate through the list with arrow keys, page up/down or the mouse wheel and easily clear the stack with a quick stab of the delete key.”

…as you can see from the image the stack of items is ordered as a river of news.

What else…

You can mark items as read, you can have items coloured according to their feed category, you can set the pop-up notifier to just feeds in a category, you can see feed history which is basically an RSS Reader (view all posts, unread posts or posts by feed…sort by date, feed, or title…read in ascending or descending order…even apply a filter).

The only thing is that I can’t get it to work for some reason…I imported my OPML…but I had a hard time filing feeds in categories…I’ll keep at it.

The other day I posted on ChatCreator where you can create an instant private chat room, something similar but quicker than Conversate.

In the post I also explained that you can do a similar thing with Gabbly, only it is not private…Gabbly chat revolves around a webpage. Just go to any webpage and prepend it with gabbly.com/
eg. http://gabbly.com/www.google.com…or hit the Gabbly bookmarklet to chat about the page you are on.
The difference here is that you are not initiating a chat, the door is always open at that URL, who ever happens to be at the the Gabblified version of that URL can chat.

Chat for blog posts

I’m also interested in chat for blog posts, along the same lines as chat for Gmail. If you have an email and the person who sent it to you also uses Gmail, then you can reply to that email by Chat…and that chat will be threaded with the email.

Not sure how to enable people to create a private chat for each blog post using a footer button for ChatCreator, but I have done it for Conversate, Gabbly and 3bubbles.

Out of all of these 3bubbles sounds the most focused on blog post chat, but Gabbly also has its advantages.

Gabbly allows you to embed a chat box on your blog, or as I have done in the footer of every blog post is to allow people to chat about that blog post with one click. If more than one person has clicked on the Gabbly button on the blog post then they can chat, it’s that easy…that chatbox will display how many Gabbers are online.

Same goes with 3bubbles, at the footer of each blog post is a link to “Live Chat” followed by a number that denotes how many people are currently chatting about that blog post.
To join a chat or see the chat history for a blog post, just click on the link and a pop-up box will appear.

Differences

Gabbly has an RSS feed for each URL chat…each URL has an archive of the chat, I guess once the box fills up it will re-fresh itself…check the RSS feed to see the history.

Now this is all good but I can’t subscribe to the chat RSS feed of every blog post on my blog, there has to be some way I can be notified if there is a chat taking place at any URL in my blog.
This is essential, if I’m aware people are chatting at one of my blog posts I can join in…but I guess Gabbly isn’t set up especially for blog posts.

3bubbles will soon develop more robust features for blog post chat, but at the moment their prime directive is targeting online communities.

3bubbles lack an RSS feed for each chat (it is coming soon), in the meantime there is a 3rd party hack called ChatWatcher to keep you in the loop, still not the solution to be notified of chats happening on all your blog posts via one feed.

If they provided feeds you could also choose to re-syndicate the chat spliced feed (from all the chat RSS feeds of all your blog posts) on the sidebar of your blog…just like latest posts, and latest comments.

The good thing about 3bubbles is that you create an account, here there is a list of chats for every blog post, clicking on a chat for a blog post will display the chat archive.

Another thing, if I myself come across another blog that uses 3bubbles, I may enter my registered nickname and take part in the conversation, my account will store a log for my conversations elsewhere (this may be coming soon).
NOTE: I can choose to chat anonymously, but then this will not be stored in my log.

Social ecosystem

The bigger picture for 3bubbles may be similar to CoComments…social sharing and discovery of where you have chatted.

Register and have 2 separate streams; chats you own, chats elsewhere…imagine an RSS feed for each user, someone can grab my RSS feed and see where I’ve been chatting.
Even more, I could describe my chats with tags, and so could all other 3bubbles users, then you can follow a chat tag eg. show me chats from all users (or just one user) about “soccer”.

Similar to CoComments the success of this is based on people registering with 3bubbles and also blogs implementing 3bubbles.
To create a chat ecosystem for blog posts everyone needs to be registered with 3bubbles (chatting anonymously won’t help in the social part of the system eg. discover chats by a user, by a tag, etc…), this is just the same with people having to register with CoComments in creating a social blog comments ecosystem.

The other key to make CoComments work is that all blog platforms have to be compliant with the CoComments system…this is just a matter of time.
This way when a CoCommenter leaves a comment it appears on the blog post and at the CoComments website similtaneously.

The obstacle for 3bubbles is that blogs don’t already have a chat section, unlike most blogs having a comments section. CoComments just rides on the comments section already present in blogs, but 3bubbles can’t do this as there is no chat section to ride on. So a big part of 3bubbles is to get bloggers to put the two lines of javascript in their post template…it just won’t happen in a big way.
If this was all in place, then like CoComments, a chat would appear in the blog post and at the 3bubbles website similtaneously.

Then we could search the blogosphere in posts, in audio posts (podcasts), posts by tags/categories, for blogs, in comments, in chats, etc…

I mentioned the obstacle for 3bubbles is that all blogs would have to physically code their post template to include a chat section for each blog post…Gabbly works around this, as we know with Gabbly there is no implementation as you can chat about any blog post on-the-fly by simply pre-pending the URL, the blog owner may not even know someone is chatting about their blog post, so this may be the key.

The downside is how do people know that you can chat about a blog post, again blog owners would still need to place a button on the blog post footer so people know they can chat about the blog post, or view the chat history of the blog post. If you already know about Gabbly you may use the bookmarklet, and simply click the bookmarklet for the page you are on to enable chat, but then not all people are Gabbers.

3bubbles feedback

The only thing missing is perhaps an email notification that someone is chatting on one of your blog posts, you need to be notified somehow. Email maybe sounds more probable, since you have an account the system could notify you that something is taking place at one of the chat URL’s you own.
NOTE: Chat URL’s I own refers to all my blog posts.
Not sure if the same thing could be achieved with a private RSS feed.

NOTE: an RSS feed to notify you someone is chatting on one of your blog posts is different to an RSS feed for every blog post. Having an RSS version of the content from every chat from your blog posts enables you to re-syndicate it or put it in an RSS Reader or feed grazer, etc…

A winning feature of 3bubbles is that you are able to point to a public URL of a blog chat (this is handy as the pop-up box for your blog chats doesn’t have a URL).
Here’s the example, just click on the title (the date) to get a permalink…also every line in the chat has its own unique URL.
The current stream shows the chat for a time period, on the right are links to earlier time periods.

I often point to unique URL’s of comments left in my blog posts, now I could point to a line in a chat for a given blog post…now that’s granular.

[ADDED: Mobber is yet another similar tool, not sure if it is sophisticated as 3bubbles]

[ADDED: itzle is similar to Gabbly]

Ideas

I like Erik Schwartz’s mention about Live Chat events…perhaps even chatcasting, whatever that means.

I also like Marlun’s mention of blog posts sharing chats…kind of like what Technorati does for blog posts.

I like the idea of the former ajchat in creating a private chat then allowing you to embed or include it somehow in your blog post.
This is like ChatCreator but allowing you to include it for your domain, each chat someone creates has just added another webpage to your domain, you can then see a list of past chats and click on one to view it…examples.

More chat

Gabbly
3bubbles
Mobber
ChatCreator
Conversate
Ajchat
itzle
Lace
Chatango
Zonk Board
Tag-Board
Hive7
Chat’N Search…embed a chat box on your blog, also people searching for the same keyword at a search engine can chat.
Congress
AJAX Shoutbox…this has been modified, from the blog post: “The difference though is that instead of having each post be its own chat, they’re all the same chat - but when you say something, your message has a link back to the page you were reading. I’m experimenting - I’m not sure if that will add value or not, but I thought it’d be neat. “
Newsvine chat for all items
Blogchat
cbox
chat trick
Userplane - Webmessenger, Userlist
Bunchball
Chatsum…from the website: “Chatsum is a FREE add-on for your web browser that lets you chat with all the other Chatsum users that are looking at the same website as you.”
Bravenet - live chat
Webmobs
Virtual Presence
May We Help - free chat
boldchat
LIVEperson - live chat
kayako - live response
yakalike (Similar to chatsum)

[ADDED 3/07/06:
Nat1on
Shout Central]

[ADDED 05/08/06: meebome]

[ADDED 07/09/06: Interaction
Geesee]

[ADDED 5/12/06: Plugoo]

[ADDED 13/12/06: InCircles]

[ADDED 22/12/06: Wengo - similar to meebome, but with video]

[ADDED 16/01/07: creamaid (not really chat, more blog conversation]

[ADDED 24/01/07: Planet Minibox : tabbed blog chats]

[ADDED 22/02/07: Yaplet…same as Gabbly]

[ADDED 22/02/07: Zpeech]

[ADDED 30/03/07: Wambo]

[ADDED 16/05/07: meebo rooms, livechat2im, Yackpack update]

[ADDED 13/06/07: MiniMobs]

Other posts:
Gabbly Chatting To Myself About The OUseful Blog…
Preview of 3Bubbles
3Bubbles - Why I’m Skeptical About Live Chat on Blogs
Webride : discuss a webpage tagging service

I really like the idea of Ziki, it aggregates personal content in a social environment
…I’ve posted about Ziki a while back but here’s a revamp.

Ziki covers 3 types of entities; for people, for companies, or aggregate zikis into a group.

- It’s a place where you can display content from all your feeds (also archives content)
- You can describe yourself with tags (find others who have described themselves with the same tags)
- You can upload your OPML (Reading List) and share it…lacks feed grazing.
- You can view your content by a cloud (word bursts)

- Add other Zikis (people) to your Network…also add private tags so you can find these people later
- Search for tags…I’d like to limit this to my Network…or even view a tag list for my Network (every search has a feed, and you can save searches)
- Add other Ziki sections to your Favourites
- Comments people leave on your Ziki…lacks a section to list comments you leave on other Zikis
- Find people who added your Ziki to their Favourites (Audience)
- Similar Zikis (based on similar tags)

Adding feeds

When you add a feed, you have to choose a feed type eg. posts
…if you then add another feed and choose “posts” again, then on the front page under the “Latest posts” heading you will see a river of news of the latest items from both these feeds.

If I have two blogs I’d like the option to see the latest items from each blog under it’s own heading…but then this will go against aggregating data by feed type for the community features.
Anyway, the Latest posts section has a link to see the feed sources, it also offers a spliced feed and an OPML (Reading List).

There are many feed types to choose from eg. if you use lots of social bookmark services, you can add these feeds under the “bookmark” feed type…don’t forget you get a spliced feed and an OPML.

Reason I’d like to make my own feed type or headings is that you can see a river of news for feed types anyway under the archives option.

I forgot to mention you also get a spliced feed and an OPML for your whole Ziki.

Groups

I guess the idea is for a group to have its own Ziki
…create or join a group.

This group feature is awesome you can read a river of news by feed type
eg. read mixed blog posts from all members, read mixed bookmarks from all members, etc…you can see this displayed on the front page, or use the Archives link.

Just like a person you can use tags to describe the group, you can even add a group to your favourites.

Feedback

I still don’t get the difference between “network” and “favourites”…if you add a ziki to “favourites” and that ziki has several feed types, then they will be added multiple times to your favourites. The you can sort your favourites by feed type…can’t this just be merged into the “network” section.

If you could make a closed group, this would be like a topic attention stream
…if you had 10 friends and each made a ziki, and in each ziki they added one feed each for the feed types: posts, bookmarks, comments, other (use this for comments you leave on other blogs), etc…

Just say these 10 people blog, bookmark, comment about a topic eg. knowledge management, then this group will be a one stop shop for posts, bookmarks, and comments related to knowledge management according to a closed group of 10 experts.

More…

I like the idea that people can discover others by tag, even for your network…what would be good is if people in a network could tag each other…kind of like a people yellow pages via tags people associate to themselves and tags others associate with them (reciprocating people tags seems more rounded).

Similar services:
- Tagalag, PeopleFeeds, 43 people

Startpages like PageFlakes, and Netvibes are similar in the way of aggregating all your feed content into one portal, PageFlakes even has a public view. But these 2 services are startpages which are more commonly used for a personal desktop, whereas services like Ziki are a space to aggregate your personal feeds within a share and discovery network, as this all occurs in a social environment.

Also similar are the Public RSS Readers, but again these aren’t in a social environment, and their focus isn’t on discovering people. Although the Public RSS Reader can display collated content from a person’s various feeds all in the one spot, the design of these services are not people centric…Ziki seems to capture each of a person’s feed and define it by feed type, each feed can be viewed separately.
Ziki has two parts; collating (re-syndicating) your content into one portal; then tagging yourself to discover similar content by people with similar interests.

Here are the more prominent Public RSS Readers
- SuprGlu, MySyndicaat, Kinja, Bozpages, Feedpile, kickRSS (most are limited to a river of news view…some allow to view contents by author tags)…Blogdigger groups allows to view content by feed (as mentioned this is lacking in Ziki)…but I like that Ziki allows to view content by feed type, and word bursts, and also every Ziki is part of a social community.

I guess Feed Collectors is a Public RSS Reader that comes close to Ziki…although Ziki is more about feed types and people.

Zimbio and GROU.PS are only mildly related as content in these services are both re-syndicated and created within the service.

[ADDED: Soon you will be able to search your Ziki]

RSS World has a hack to enable an RSS feed for your Feedburner circulation numbers in 2 easy steps.

Step 1. Activate your Feedburner Awareness API (see the Publicized tab in your admin area)

Step 2. Add your feed name after the “=” in this URL:
http://lab.rss-world.info/feedburner-feedstats/stats2feed.php?feeds=

Here’s mine:

http://lab.rss-world.info/feedburner-feedstats/stats2feed.php?feeds=LibraryClips

Graze this at 2RSS (thanks 3spots).

To do it for multiple feeds just add a comma, you can also add a date range eg. &days=7

Here is my feed and my comments feed for the last 7 days:
http://lab.rss-world.info/feedburner-feedstats/stats2feed.php?feeds=LibraryClips,LibraryClipsComments&days=7

Graze this at 2RSS.

Here is the Feedburner Awareness API documentation.

I can enable feeds for my blog categories, if I did this I would run them through Feedburner first, this way I could keep statistics on each category…see which categories are most popular.
But the hard thing about this is I’d need a subscriber number chicklet for each category.

So if any coders can hack into the API and allow you to combine multiple feedburner feeds into the same chicklet, this would be awesome…Improbulus asked for this a while back.

RSS World also has Feed2PDF, similar to RSS2PDF, and RSS2PDF.org.

The obvious difference between a wiki and an EDMS is that a wiki stores and presents (publishes) webpages, whereas an EDMS stores folders and files.

There are numerous differences and killer features between these two content management systems, but I’m going to draw on the big picture or better still when can a wiki be used instead of, or to complement an EDMS.

I really enjoyed reading, Using wikis on the intranet: The British Council case study…this article sparked this blog post as it documented a use-case focus…we need more of these experience type articles.

A wiki is collaborative or communal website, anyone (access allowed) can edit a wiki webpage, sames goes with a document (and its metadata) or folder structure in an EDMS.
Also both these systems have version control, and a version history…EDMS’s also can have a click trail.

I haven’t had much experience with wikis, but I’ll explain the EDMS I use at work.

Just like a wiki, if you have remote access to the Intranet you can use the EDMS from home.
To edit, you check out a document for an edit session, while it’s checked out others cannot edit the same document, they can only see who is in the edit session and email that person to “hurry up” …the only thing they can do is view the document (not the one being edited, they can view the last version of the document).

What you can do is get automatic email notification when that document is checked back in from the edit session. Also after a document is checked in, the person may also decide to edit the metadata, eg. they may decide to change the title of the document.
Not sure if wiki pages have metadata, but this is sure handy in an EDMS for fielded searching and reporting…full-text searching is also available.

Just like a wiki each document has a version history, after an edit session the current version is displayed, and previous versions are stored.

Why a wiki?

It seems they are both collaborative editing environments (not real-time), keeping track of document history. In the end they are both electronic filing cabinets of documents (EDMS) or pages (wiki).

What I like about wikis is that the content is presented as a website, whereas an EDMS (or at least the one I use) looks like a filing cabinet…not too different than Microsoft Windows.

As mentioned at the start one hosts webpages and the other documents, this is the fundamental difference, but if you don’t need your content in MSWord or Excel, etc…then a webpage format could be an alternative…just type in text into the WYSIWYG editor and you’re web publishing with the greatest of ease.

I’m not saying it’s an alternative, but sometimes content (like brainstorming or minutes of meeting) doesn’t really require MSWord, why not use a wiki…don’t be afraid to leave the safety of what you know…we already have a hurdle with knowledge sharing as people won’t get their heads out of email, MSWord, etc…

So if your content is OK in webpage format, then you are really rolling, as all these webpages become part of your wiki website…you can have a homepage, category pages, images, re-syndicate feed content, favourite links, etc…
This website look can be much more pleasing than navigating around or drilling down in a EDMS environment…sure you can make short cuts to documents in an EDMS, you can also list featured items/links in your EDMS homepage, but it just doesn’t have the design and flexibility of a webpage.

Even if your work just had a wiki, and not an EDMS, but still wanted some content in MSWord of Excel…well you can store these on the network server and link to it, or maybe just attach these in your wiki.
Then what about collaborating and version control without an EDMS, an answer to this is using an alternative to Microsoft like Online wordprocessing and spreadsheets offered by service like Zoho.

Complementary

I think an EDMS could be re-vamped with a plug-in wiki module, or just use an external wiki it doesn’t matter.

Why I say this is that an EDMS files all your content, but it would be good to make a gateway link page to all featured or heavily used documents. But this could be more than a link page, it could be the webpage for your business unit or project. You could have links, a blog (for announcements), re-syndicate news, a link to polls, a link to a forum, etc…basically presenting your filing cabinet as a typical website.

Now you don’t need a wiki to do this, but since a wiki enables people to publish their own homepages so easily, you don’t need an expert intranet programmer doing it for you, the staff can do it themselves. If a staff member has a new feature document they can add a link to it in the wiki themselves, no waiting anymore as we are all empowered.

So the content in the wiki itself can be used to present and display content that is kept in the EDMS, and although this can be done with traditional webpages, wikis allow staff to make changes to these pages.
I like the idea that as a staff member the page that represents my business unit can be owned by all of us together (a belonging, and proud factor).

Use case comparison eg. Minutes of Meeting (MoM)

EDMS

- navigate to the MoM folder
- create a new MSWord document for this weeks agenda
- when a new document is created in this folder you can be automatically notified by email
- staff can add to this document (even from home)
- when someone finishes editing this document you can be automatically notified by email
- while the meeting is happening this same document can be edited by one person (action notes)
- when the meeting is over and the document is checked back in you can be automatically notified by email
- when each person has completed their task, they can edit the agenda and cross out (strikethrough) their task to signify it’s completed, others can automatically be notified by email…or the strikethrough can be the MSWord Track changes option.
(In this case when you go to the document to see the changes how are you going to know why you were sent the automatic email, out of all the strikethroughs how do you remember which task was the most recently completed…maybe each person could have a blog to describe their completed task…others can be notified by RSS)

How is a wiki different?

The obvious difference is that the EDMS just stores/points to the file, whereas in a wiki there is no file, the content is within the wiki itself, it is not a MSWord file it is a wiki webpage.

We know both systems have version control and collaborative features, but since I have limited experience using wikis, maybe others can comment on the collaborative process part, ie. the difference between using MSWord Track Changes housed in an EDMS or using a wiki webpage as part of a wiki website.

This MoM example could also be applied to using an EDMS or a wiki for brainstorming ideas.

An obvious part I didn’t make explicit is that using a EDMS also requires using MSWord to store the content…once you have created a document (in one system) you have to upload it to the EDMS (another system).
Whereas a wiki is a system to itself, it both creates and store webpages.