BlogBridge:Library is open for inspection
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.
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Nice to see it up and it looks nice. Oen big problem is that is that it hard to figure out how to display the actual blog for each RSS feed. I hadn’t heard of many of these blogs and wanted to see what they looked like but ended up opening a second tab to find them out on the Internet.
Also, would Blogbridge support a simple “Subsribe via email” link? Not everyone wants to use a news aggregator. Many people prefer to get tables of contents, for instance, via email and not in an aggregator.
Comment by Hope Leman — June 19, 2006 @ 5:38 am
Just click on the thumbnail image and it launches to the native website…if this is what you mean.
I don’t work for BlogBridge, but I doubt they will add an email subscription for each feed as the content isn’t made within bb:library…all they do is make available the feed.
In saying this, maybe you could do this but you may need a techie to mash it up for you.
If you installed it on your server and everyone in your workplace used eg. Attensa for outlook, you might place an “ADD to ATTENSA” icon instead of the generic feed icon, when people press this it will open up their RSS Reader and add the feed (effortlessly)…actually not sure if you can easy subscribe with desktop readers.
The same thing, next to each thumbnail you could add a feedblitz or Rmail icon…to do the RSS to email thing.
Even use Gmail as an RSS Reader:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/08/26/gmail-rss-reader-hack/
Comment by Johnt — June 19, 2006 @ 6:58 am
John,
Thanks for the post. The one thing I wanted to emphasize in terms of the comparison with Top Ten Sources is that the BlogBridge Library that you can link to at www.blogbridge.com/directory is a “show case” for the software. Yes it’s useful (hopefully) in and of itself, but the core motivation of the product is to allow people/organizations/companies to build *their own* directories. I know you realized this (from your first post) but it’s worth emphasizing that in that major sense BlogBridge:Library is fundamentally different from Top Ten Sources, so really we don’t view ourselves as competing with them at all.
Comment by Pito Salas — June 19, 2006 @ 12:41 pm