Library clips

Micro Persuasion points to SpeedyFeed…first it was create your own spliced feed and display the contents on a public webpage as a river of news, and now in the tradition of startpages, it is display the contents in RSS display boxes (widgets).

Choose some feeds from the feed cloud, or enter feeds or an OPML (yeah)…sort order of feeds…it even recommends feeds.

Choosing a feed from the feed cloud is an easy way to add a feed to your account, at first I thought this was a social feature, where you click on a feed name (eg. TechCrunch), and it displays all the SpeeyFeed pages containing this feed.

Here is my Top 10 feeds in Speedyfeed, see it in a similar service called Bozpage.

I really like the options in Bozpage: widget view, river view or cloud view (displays full-text when you hover over a post).

Alternatively here is the traditional view in Top 10 Sources.

MyToday is a very similar service, hovering over a post displays an excerpt just like in SpeedyFeed, the one thing I like better about MyToday is that you can collapse your boxes, just like in a startpage, eg.netvibes.

One thing missing is to display the OPML, or even a spliced feed…Bozpage also lacks this, but it does display the feed URL next to each feed box.
I’d also like to create a title for my page…another handy feature would be to have tabs, this way you can make paged topics.
[ADDED 1/09/06: Bozpages actually does have an OPML]

Check out this post for more services that allow you to make a public page to display your aggregate of RSS Display Boxes.

Are PIM tools still in vogue or are Startpages overtaking this space?

Here is my list of web 2.0 PIM tools (Personal Information Management)…these services have to be more than an RSS Reader and bookmark manager, I’m looking for services that contain an RSS Reader, bookmark manager, email, IM, notes, to-do, contacts, forum, blog, etc…

Brim
Haystack
Nextaris (no longer)
omea pro
My Personal Home Page

…I’m sure there are loads more, perhaps this is more a question for Listible, Otavo, Fanpop, etc…

Not included are similar tools that are not at a personal level, these are more web 2.0 based project management, content management services, such as eloops, Near-Time, Wild Apricot, centraldesktop, Basecamp, etc…

Also not included are services that only include calendars, to-do, notes, contacts eg. AirSet, HipCal, Backpack, etc…

I like the idea of an all in one PIM (Personal Information Management) tool, but the problem is that each module just doesn’t cut it, eg. I use Rojo for RSS Reading (I don’t really use the bookmarking module), I use del.icio.us for bookmarking, I use Gmail for email, calendar, IM, I use Yedda for Q&A, I use ziki for profile, I use Google Notebook for notes, I use Rasasa for alerts, and I haven’t yet worked out what I use for photo’s, video’s, tasks, to-do, time, files, etc…this list could go on forever, but I guess I have mentioned the essentials.

I guess the idea of a startpage (such as Pageflakes and netvibes) is a work around this as you can re-syndicate or enable widgets for all your services on the one page, these are especially effective when they are fully functional within the start page, eg. meembo, Gabbly, del.icio.us, and Box.net in netvibes.

Others that are not fully functional modules in netvibes are Flickr, Writely, digg, ebay, and Gmail.

At the same time startpages have their own tools such as bookmarks, calendar, weather, to-do, notes, RSS Reader (just check out the PageFlakes awesome inbuilt RSS Reader).

NOTE: you can even feed or OPML graze or web surf with the Bitty Browser widget…see the rest.

Startpages can have:
- inbuilt modules
- host other services basically fully functional
- host other services not fully functional

In a way startpages are becoming a dream, instead of a service trying to build the best swiss army PIM tool, you can create your own using a start page, thanks to widgets.

But then again a tool like Haystack allows for each of these modules to talk to each other, true integration…I feel the IBM PIM dashboards do a similar thing, eg. tag someone into Fringe Contacts from within the IM.

3spots has the latest in webpage monitoring with a service called Diffbot, it is an RSS Reader with a built in webpage monitor…the great thing it seems is that you can read your monitored webpages in RSS Reader tradition.

I mostly use WatchThatPage, and I get updates by email, I guess there is no stopping me converting this email into RSS to read it in my RSS Reader. Or I can read the latest by logging in to WatchThatPage, but this isn’t a great experience. This is where Diffbot takes off, they have just made the reading experience more with what you are used to.

Although if you use Feedwhip, you need not bother, as this monitoring service enables you to login to read, sends email alerts, or even generates a feed for each of your alerts to subscribe to…pity the login interface isn’t set up to look like an RSS Reader. But you can subscribe to these feeds in your usual RSS Reader…just make a folder for your webpage monitoring feeds.

I guess the good thing about Diffbot is that your webpage monitor and your RSS Reader are the same client…this is handy, but l can never find an all in one web 2.0 swiss army PIM tool that I’ll be happy with.

NOTE: Feedwhip is based in a social network environment, where you can look at a users monitored items, or browse these items by tag.
Sorry about that I got carried away, the only communal part about it, is that you can view the most recent feed whips. Actually some updates are you can group your feeds into a single feed, and you can have multiple email addresses per account.

Also see Newzie, it is a desktop RSS Reader with a webpage monitoing module…Elsua has a thorough post on this and other great features, this is an advanced RSS Reader.

What is Simply Headlines…it’s basically a webpage snaphot of an RSS Reader.

Create your own webpage that is structured like an RSS Reader
- left pane has a subscription feed set
- right pane is to read the content
- end of the left pane also has (Daily Glimpse) the top posts from each feed

ADDED 30/08/06: you don’t get a public webpage, you just get a private preview webpage, the main deal is that you get a daily newspaper in your email or mobile.

You don’t have to use the subscriptions on the left pane, all they do is hyperlink you the corresponding spot on the page.

1. Choose feeds from the directory or add your own
2. Rank order of your feeds
3. Choose email alert time (option to suspend delivery)

You can also share your feeds with friends, also add a Simply Headlines subscription button to your blog.

I really like the idea of printing out your personal news (assimilating a newspaper), until now RSS is being predominately used in a 2/3 pane RSS Reader, or as a re-syndication service, or as RSS to email alerts.

FeedBlitz and others do offer a daily, weekly digest version…so I don’t see this being to different to Simply Headlines.
Also RSS2PDF makes a great way to print out your full-text newspaper.

Feedback

I’d like to set 2 email alerts, for the morning and afternoon train ride home…there is an option to get a copy of the digest at any time.

Lacks OPML import.

Lacks a Public page.

Lacks Full-text…this is a show stopper, as it no longer becomes an alternative to a full-text newspaper.

Needs more personalisation, so far it uses the RSS basics, choose your own feeds, and choose the order…what about filtering for terms in each feed or across all feeds (see here, my favourite is Feed Digest, even Feed Rinse), or read by author tags (SuprGlu, MySyndicaat), or user tags (MyFeedz), or machine tags (MyFeedz, WizAg, Zoom Clouds, TagCloud, Personal Bee).

NOTE: MyFeedz also has machine tags.

You could first process your feeds in any of the above ways from the above services, and then enter this feed or feeds through Simply Headlines.
But, this will only allow me to read specific posts from a feed via filtering (Feed Digest), or via user tags (MyFeedz)…problem here is that you are not going to see all posts from each feed.

Whereas reading via author tags (SuprGlu, MySyndicaat) or machine tags (WizAg, Zoom Clouds, TagCloud, Personal Bee) allows you to read every post, only categorised by tag…but then each tag doesn’t have a feed, therefore you can’t enter your feed set in Simply Headlines (MyFeedz tags do have feeds, so this could be an option to use the machine tags version).

OK, so the idea is for this to be built in, I want to read every post in every feed, but I might want to first read posts that have a particular author tag, or by a keyword I’ve set.

I could say ” In this feed I’d like to read the posts about OPML first, then blogs second, then folksonomy third, then the rest”…or I could set this across the whole feed set.

At the moment you can rank feeds, these suggested personal filters would augment this process by allowing you to rank posts in each feed or across all feeds according to keywords…read the posts you prefer first (this makes up for not being able to track your reading behaviour or social behaviour eg. clicks, flags, saves, ratings…as this isn’t a real RSS Reader).

These personal filters don’t neccessarily have to mean that your prefered posts are ranked higher, instead you could set it so these posts are bigger in editorial size.

I’m alluding to another requested feature (firstly full-text is essential), for this personal newspaper to actually have some structure like a traditional newspaper.

Options

Organise (section) newspaper by:

- feeds, and rank them (as you can currently do)

- filtered keywords/topics and rank them…within each feed (these are also still ranked) or across all feeds

Or

- filtered editorial posts are bigger, not neccessarily first

This means that the sections can be organised by feed name, but the filtered posts are bigger in size…or the sections can be organised by keyword, but the posts most about the keyword are bigger editorials.

In this instance the ranking of posts within a feed doesn’t matter, because when you read a traditonal newspaper, it is not in a total linear format, a typical page has boxes of news clippings all over it, the one that grabs you is due to; the size of the headline, what the headline says, size of the editorial, position on the page, colour, pictures, etc…

NOTE: these filtered keywords could be of your choosing or machine filtering (it is your choice, what’s important is that you can read all posts in the order or way you want to read/see them).

NOTE: another option is to rank posts according to inlinks (this is more popularity than personalisation).

NOTE: maybe we could even have a recommended posts section for good measure.

In the end I want to make my own daily traditional newspaper…and there are some contenders:

RSS Daily Newspaper
myBroadSheet as an RSS Newspaper
RSS Star : RSS Newspaper

First Adam Green created a mashup to graze the feeds from the latest posts in tech.meme, and then he added some Technorati action to it, check it out…this is an annotated grazing list.

Raj Kumar Dash would like to do this for a given Technorati search, that is, create a grazing list from the feeds of the posts listed in a Technorati search…of course this would be dynamic as the search results change over time. Isn’t that what Grazing lists are purely about, grazing a feed list that is continuely changing it’s feed set due to (not human intervention), but due to machine operations.

NOTE: If a human has an OPML Reading List, they are not as prone to change the feeds within this set that often, so another user is not going to consult it everyday for feed shopping (potential feed subscriptions for your RSS Reader), as it won’t change much.
Whereas a feed set based on selection and rotation from machine crunching (eg. feed from new posts on tech.meme, or feeds from posts in a Technorati search) is more guaranteed to be a revolving feed set every day, even perhaps hourly.
I guess that’s the difference between an OPML Reading List and an OPML Grazing List.

Anyway, I read on the Grazr blog about a new mashup by Tom Morris, it kind of a grazer web.
The intial screen displays posts that are incoming links to the post in question (see top bar), notice these posts are in folders.
Only thing is that these posts only show a title and exerpt of the post, if you click on the post there is a link to the native post, with some other treats, such as, a link to the blog homepage, a link to the blog’s RSS feed, and then wait for it, you can see inlinks to this post, or even inlinks to this blog in general.

Get it, so it’s like a grazing web, you start with the initial post and view posts that link to it, then click on one of these posts, and see posts linking to it, then click on these posts and see posts linking to it, and so on…it’s like the BlogPulse Conversation Tracker, only grazing conversations.

Maybe Dapper will enable more of these treats.

Now we need a bookmarklet that will scrape feeds off a given page, and wrap it in OPML so you can graze it…maybe Tony Hirst has made one of these I can’t remember, his workshop has numerous DIY tools.
NOTE: I can remember a bookmarklet that scrapes any hyperlinks off a given page and wraps it in OPML, and one that only recognises the post title URL’s and ignores all other URL’s on the page.

Actually, I think the Feedshow OPML Builder can help us to just strip feed URL’s off a given page and wrap it in OPML, then all we need to do is graze it.

This would be ideal to strip the feed URL’s from a Technorati search result, automatically create an OPML and then graze it in grazr. Only thing is that Technorati don’t promote the feed URL for each post in the search results…this would make DIY grazing lists a breeze.

Related:
Grazing TagJag at Grazr via YubNub.
Ego graze who is talking about a blog post within the post itself
Graze tags from your blog post

Original Signal is simply a newsmastering effort that re-syndicates several web 2.0 blogs, like typical newsmastering this is not a mixed river of news, it’s more of a dashboard approach…see this post for similar services to make your own.
For similar pre-made services, click the link in this post.

PULP is set to be a social bookmarks and more that can be installed for enterprise use.

Some clever additions are adding content from your mobile device, and also automating this by scanning barcodes from your mobile device to add it to the collections.

Another feature is a type of flagging so others know what the owner of the collection “has” apart from “what they want to have”.

The post explains walking through a bookstore and scanning a book to see if it exists within a friends collection, and if it does, and if they own it, you can borrow it for free instead of purchasing it.

Since instances of PULP aren’t on a common server, p2p feature will enable file sharing.

Some related enterprise bookmarking services are available here.

TechCrunch points to Dapper, a service that enables non-techies to create an API for any site.

From the post:

“Here’s how it works. Users identify a web site they are interested in extracting data from and view it through the Dapper virtual browser. Aizen showed my how to do it using Digg as an example. I clicked on a story headline, on the number of diggs and the via URL field. I went to another page on the same site and did the same thing so that Dapper could clearly identify the fields I was interested in. I then went through the various tools available on the site to set certain conditions and threshholds and ended up with XML feeds I could do all kinds of things with. Like send me an email whenever there’s a TechCrunch story on the front page of digg, or when a search results page shows a TechCrunch story with more than 10 diggs.”

“The alerts are of most interest to me, but data from other sites can be mapped on Google Maps, turned into an RSS feed for sites that don’t publish feeds, turned into a slideshow if the data is in the form of images. Aizen says he’s created a tool for himself that runs feeds through Babblefish automatically and produces a translated feed. The possibilities are huge.”

This allows for DIY mashups the way Ning allows for DIY creation of applications.

Maybe non-techies can think up and create mashups like Adam Green’s (scroll to “more”) collecting feeds from tech.meme and feeding them into grazr (updating hourly), or a similar idea for Technorati search from Raj Kumar Dash…also see Adam Green’s annotated grazr mashup…more.

I’ve been waiting for something like Socialmeter for some time.

If you enter your blog URL it will inform you the number of times the URL has been bookmarked across several bookmark services…it would need to consult more services to be as exhaustive as what Technorati is for the blogosphere, 3spots says that this isn’t easy.

It basically does one aspect for bookmark services that Technorati does for blog services, that is, link searching or even ego searching for some…Technorati allows you to enter your blog URL, and it will return all posts talking about your blog, well Socialmeter does this for bookmarks.

Hang on, no it doesn’t!

Firstly it doesn’t need to return posts, it just returns a number, although it could return the user space URL’s of the people who bookmarked your blog homepage, so you can go and check ‘em out.

Secondly, if you put in your blog homepage, all you will get are the number of times that the homepage has been bookmarked, it doesn’t count all posts from your blog.

If you want to know how many times all your posts have been bookmarked you would have to do an ego search for each post…ouch!
When you do a link search in Technorati you enter your blog homepage URL and it returns links from people that point to any page on your blog, not just your homepage.

Here’s a link search for my blog’s home page on Socialmeter…or see it as the screen shot in the 3spots post

If you notice at the above link my score on del.icio.us is 87, now if you check this out in del.icio.us, it is correct.

But, again it doesn’t show all posts from your blog by just entering your homepage URL…I know Spurl and Simpy have this feature.

Here’s an ego search on Simpy for my blog (it even generates a feed).
All I did was enter the URL of my blog homepage and it shows bookmarks for my posts as well, not just my homepage.

NOTE: Irony is that Simpy won’t do this search for a blog post, it will only do it for a domain or sub-domain search…of course you can view the URL history page and find out, just like in del.icio.us.

Here’s my ego search in Spurl (it also generates a feed).

Another piece of feedback would be to split the results, so you could see the total for just bookmark services, and another total from the blogosphere.

Actually, what does your socialmeter number mean…it documents how many times a page has been bookmarked, this is a sign of popularity, combined with this it tells you how many people talk about you in their blog posts, this is another sign of popularity, so I guess combining these two figures is OK.
The thing I don’t get is that to measure your popularity in the blogosphere (inlinks) you can only use one service, but it seems to use Google and Technorati. Now this is OK if you remove the duplicates, but if you don’t, then the socialmeter number is inflated.

So what do I want…

I want to do a single ego search across a meta-bookmark service, then I want it to tell me how many times any post or page in my blog has been bookmarked in each service, and an overall total.
Also for each service I would like the pages of the users displayed so I can check out who’s bookmarking my posts, what tags they use, etc…

This way the blogosphere ego search will let me know who’s talking about my posts (perhaps finding my posts worthy), and the meta-bookmark ego search will let me know who and which posts of mine are found worthy enough to bookmark, and how they describe these bookmarks with comments and tags.

There are plenty of statistics to gather for your blog, but I find these two very valuable at a granular level, plus it connects you with people.

3spots also points out that Socialmeter also has a Feeds generator…

What I’d like it to do is let me know when someone bookmarks one of my posts…but this isn’t a reality for now.
Next I thought that it may let you know when your socialmeter number increases, but what it does is show your total for each post.

Enter your blog feed, and it generates a feed for you…everytime you post it will appear in this feed letting you know the numbers of times it has been bookmarked.
I don’t get it, it will nearly always be zero, as the Socialmeter feed may poll your feed before anyone has had a chance to bookmark it…perhaps I’ve got it wrong.

Maybe it could be an SLE feed, this way the totals are always being reflected in your feed…if a post in your socialmeter feed is 10 posts down in your RSS Reader, and all of a sudden it is bookmarked a hell of a lot, then it can rank higher amongst the other posts in that feed in your RSS Reader.
In this aspect the feed is more of a popularity list, than the latest content.

Anyway, here’s my feed generated, and you can graze the contents at 2RSS.

I thought Alesti was a nice, clean, easy, simple web-based RSS Reader for beginners, well look no further than Newshutch.

Firstly web-based is easy, all you have to do is register and away you go, plus you can access your feeds on any computer.

But the first hitch like always is to subscribe to some feeds…this needs work, as newbies don’t know what RSS or feeds are, they don’t know how to subscribe to content, other than old school email alerts.

Anyway, besides collecting your feedset, the easy and smooth part is reading your feeds, and marking them read/unread.

Features:
- OPML import
- bookmarklet
- keyboard shortcuts
- manage feeds
- organise feeds in folders

Other:
- option to only show unread entries
- show entries from a time range…last hour, day, week, etc…
- mark a post read
- keep a post read
- mark all read
- open next feed
- mark all read and open next feed
- mark everything read (scroll down to the end of your subscriptions)
- separate scroll bars for your subscriptions and posts

I don’t think the following features are essentials for people new to reading feeds, but here are the lacking features:
- tags (feeds appearing in multiple folders)
- river of news
- bookmarking
- flagging
- then there is personalisation, but we won’t go there

I don’t care that much for bookmarking as I use a separate service, but I do like flagging posts into one folder. It kind of does this as you can keep a single item unread, but then these will blend in with the new batch of new items. Plus they are distributed, a flagged folder will have all your purposefully unread items in the one spot…personally I’d like both features.

Also, river of news is an essential for me (folder or whole level)…anyway if it had these two features I’d seriously consider using this over of the current more powerful RSS Reader I use, sometimes you just have to go back to simplicity…my feed set is getting smaller these days, so simple is OK.