Your own public feed grazer
Once before I mentioned that it would be great if a newsmastering service like Blogdigger Groups, and MySyndicaat could subscribe to an OPML…this post is Dynamic newsmastering with OPML.
NOTE: Not generate an OPML, but for them to subscribe to an OPML, actually to subscribe to many of them.
This would be like a public version of what you can get from BlogBridge…not that I’ve used BlogBridge, but I assume something similar.
Another thought is instead of a news of river display, is to have a newsmastering service that feed grazes…and
Optimal is the prime candidate. Similar to Blogdigger Groups, but for grazing instead.
How it would work
Let’s take Optimal as the example, you join up and get your user space, you load up, for example, 5 OPML’s (these could be batches of feeds for your favourite topics eg. library, km, blogs, etc…)
These 5 OPML’s are your 1st level folders, and then you get topic grazing.
Now you can already shortcut to this…all you do is put your 5 OPML’s as “includes” in a mother OPML, then just whack this mother OPML in Optimal.
But it would be easier if you just come across an OPML and add it to you Optimal (even via a bookmarklet)…in this case the Optimal itself could create your mother OPML (or OPML directory/OPML menu)
The homepage of Optimal could showcase user spaces, not sure how Optimal would file these, they can’t really organise user spaces by category, as each user space would have loads of topics within it, how would you know which category fits best. An A-Z user list doesn’t really do much for context…maybe users could tag their user space.
Then we could browse users by tag…hmmm…maybe each tag could have an OPML (each user space being an “include”)…maybe this is going to far.
Each Blogdigger Group can be about a topic, it’s straight forward, whereas if a user creates a an OPML directory a category to file it in is stressful as the OPML Directory is just too hard to define.
NOTE: Blogdigger Groups doesn’t organise their groups in categories (although it could).
So maybe this doesn’t have to be social, just create your own Optimal, and since it has a public URL others can see it…why not.
The Optimal homepage could showcase some and just have an A-Z list.
The whole reason for this rant is that quite often I graze OPML’s at Optimal that I don’t want in my RSS Reader…I just like going to Optimal from time to time to catch up with these OPML’s.
Of course that means for every one of these OPML’s I have an Optimal URL (I want them in the one URL), that’s why a user space would be good, where I can subscribe to at least 5 OPML’s to graze when I like. It’s also good as a collecting bay, to try out the new OPML’s you have found before committing them to your RSS Reader.
Actually I just realised both Bitty and Grazr allow you to do this, you can display something like an OPML menu/directory…the only thing is that you have to create the mother OPML yourself.
The other thing is that both these services no longer have standalone unique URL’s.
A way to get around this
At OPML Workstation you can create as many OPML’s as you like, I could create one called “test”.
If OPML Workstation had a bookmarklet, when I find an OPML I could hit the bookmarklet, I would select an OPML (eg. test), and done…I will have now added an OPML within my OPML called “test” (adding an OPML inside an OPML is an “include“…this is the beginnings of an OPML Directory).
I would already have the OPML called “test” at a standalone URL at Optimal (kept in my favourites)…now I can graze the new OPML I added within my “test” OPML at Optimal.
It’s quite simple really.
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Hi John, sorry that I promised a few things a while back and never actually got around to implementing them (things have gone from crazy to hectic). Now that I’m back on working on functional elements I’ll try to get back to some of the really great ideas you’ve tossed around here.
One quick correction though, Grazr actually does have a standalone unique URL that can be called. When you run the ‘configuration’ page on Grazr.com, the last step (step 5) is a link that says ‘launch’. That link has the format for a unique url for a Grazr to be displayed. The form of the url is the following
http://grazr.com/gzpanel.html?file=http://grazr.com/index.xml
Where ‘file’ is the atom,rss,rdf, or opml url.
The only rule is that the ‘file’ option must be at the end of the string. Font, fontsize, and other options can be in any order before. The old ’sandbox’ url was a bit too server intensive and this new version is much cleaner.
Comment by mikepk — June 7, 2006 @ 6:18 am
Thanks Mike, it’s still there.
Comment by Johnt — June 8, 2006 @ 2:17 am