Library clips

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.