Library clips

ChatCreator is a very easy to use private chat tool.

To create a chat just enter a name for that chat and hit go, then send the chat URL to a friend, once you are both viewing this URL you can chat.

This seems more disposal than Conversate, but much easier to get a chat started as you don’t need to register.

I guess the chat is permanent and you continue later on as the URL is unique and isn’t going anywhere…now how to add this to the footer of my blog posts.

At the moment if someone reads my blog posts and they want synchronus communication, they can click on the Gabbly icon to chat to others on the Gabbly page of my post, or they can click the 3bubbles link, but they are limited to chatting to others who have done the same.
Actually, Gabbly will work quite easily, just like you email or IM a friend the ChatCreator URL you created, just send them the Gabbly URL for the post, or send them the post and get them to hit the Gabbly bookmarklet.

NOTE: For others not familiar with Gabbly, for any URL just put “gabbly.com” at the start of the URL, and a chat box will appear for the URL, or click the Gabbly bookmarklet to chat about the page you are on.
If anyone else has done the same you can chat, otherwise email or IM your friend and tell them do to what you did and you can chat.
Same goes with 3bubbles, just send your friend the blog post URL and get them to click the 3bubbles icon on the footer of the blog post…the advantage with Gabbly is that you don’t need the blog owner to have the icon on the footer you can launch the chat box yourself.

So it seems Gabbly is just as easy as using ChatCreator to instantly chat about a blog post, only ChatCreator is more private (invitation based)
I’ve also got the conversate icon on each blog post footer for people to private chat about a blog post, it is more cumbersome, but still effective.

Now for 3spots to work some magic so I can footerise this chat.

Here’s an example of using Gabbly, see who else is on Gabbly for the Google homepage URL
http://gabbly.com/www.google.com
If no-one is there but you want to chat about Google in general to a friend give them the URL, or tell them to go to the Google homepage and prepend it with gabbly.com/

BlogBridge:Library is now open for preview and later today will be open for trial.

If you don’t know what BlogBridge:Library is check out my post, it’s basically a feed directory organised into topics, and with a built in blog.
Now that the enterprise is beginning to take on blogging and RSS there is a need to showcase these feeds, and also a need to discover and share feeds.

Features

Firstly let me say that the idea is that you can tailor this library to your website/intranet…

The homepage has a navigation bar where you would list some or all your topics.

The body of the homepage displays whatever topics you like, maybe just a selection…you could add a link to the navigation bar for A-Z topics, or if you had similar type topics like blogs, RSS, OPML, web2.0, etc…you could group these on a webpage and put a link in the navigation bar called “best of web2.0 topics”.

As you can see the homepage has an OPML, this contains every topic, and every feed within every topic…pretty neat…graze it in Optimal.

As you can see every topic has a thumbnail of the feeds website and a direct link to the feed, you can browse feeds within a topic similar to a slide show…also notice each topic has an OPML.
NOTE: each topic OPML is an “include” in the root OPML (homepage)

Each topic has its own page (eg. Apple Mac), as does each thumbnail (or click on the thumbnail to goto the native site).

Each topic displays a picture of the topic owner, the homepage displays a picture of the library master.

Another great feature is the Top 10 and the Top 100, both with an OPML.

There is also the library masters inhouse announcement blog.

A really simple and effective outlay, not too overloaded on features…the uesr friendliness design is important for RSS newbies.

I’m excited to see how the bb:library develops, it’s a great idea that Pito is opening up a trial, I’m keen to see how many topics are added and how these topics will be organised

…will there be a category/directory to house the topics (top-down), or will a tagcloud do the job (bottom-up).

If you are browsing A-Z topics it would be good to Collapse all topics, so you can quickly browse the topic list, and expand a topic you would like to see.

Since each thumbnail page is dedicated to a feed, it would be good to see the latest posts from the feed…I think this will be coming as these pages have alot of space at the moment.
What about the latest posts from a topic (river of news or sorted by feed)…maybe a feed grazer like Grazr would fit in nicely. I think this is important for the try before you buy factor…indeed all this will be coming soon in good time.

In the future maybe each topic could have it’s own inhouse blog, or if topics are organised into a category/directory, maybe each category could have it’s own blog.
This blog could be used as announcements or even as an editorial blog covering the best posts within each topic…this is what the editorial blog does for the Corante Web Hub.

NOTE: I know bb:library is just what it is a library, but I think it also could have the potential for editorial coverage…not just a place to find feeds/opml’s but also a place to graze feeds/opml’s and keep up with the latest in these topics via the editorial blog.

How does this compare to Top 10 Sources?

Firstly the idea is to have your own library customised to how you want it.

Secondly it is a directory first, whereas Top 10 Sources is also a directory but it’s focus is on displaying content rather than the source.

Both can be social, everyone can be a topic master, and maybe open up their topic for communal editing (wiki-ike).

In saying all this, these 2 services are very similar but one is emphasising on sources, the other on content.