Library clips

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