Library clips

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]