Library clips

Want to keep up with RSS services and tools, well the ever clever Marjolein Hoekstra has done some awesome newsmastering and presents a feed grazing window into the RSS world.

Basically she has collected a feedset for RSS services, which can be grazed in Grazr.

For non-straight forward feeds, she has done some Feed Digest filtering/splicing, and even used Blogdigger (this is a clever search engine as you can create a search feed for a category from a blog).

This has all been collected in BlogBridge and packaged in an OPML, the beauty of it is when she adds a new feed, it will appear in the Grazr feed set.

Here is a list I sometimes update, this list is very dumb and static.
Compare it to Marjolein’s web2.0 style list…very dynamic indeed, read stuff without leaving the list.

Also I’d like to see this list by type eg. RSS readers, RSS filter/splice, RSS alerts, RSS re-syndicate, etc….maybe using folders.

I guess you’d have to choose between the A-Z list or by type, I wonder if you could do both?

Grazr has come a long way, I hope they plan to allow people to create the actual OPML using Grazr…at the moment I use OPML Workstation, (I haven’t tried iJot yet) this allows me to create any kind of OPML, not just feeds.

Grazr could also host a place to present your OPML, instead of Marjolein’s having to use a blog post, but a blog post does allow you to post announcements about your OPML Grazing List, and also use the sidebar portal like features. Grazr do have a permanent link at their website for your Grazing List, but I’m talking a proper user space like BlogBridge library.

BlogBridge Library
- create and host an OPML Reading List only
- at the moment it is just a feed directory, with an inbuilt blog…you can’t read content…coming soon I hope
- also I’d like to see some code to add a BlogBridge feed grazer to your blog sidebar
…this way your enterprise could make a feed directory, where you can take the feeds away to read in your RSS Reader or read them in the directory itself, and also be able to get code to re-syndicate a spliced feed for your OPML topic or even better an OPML Grazer.

This way the Intranet page for your business unit can host a little public RSS/OPML Reader/Grazer instead of having to go to the directory.
Staff members could bookmark this page and read the latest, without requiring their own RSS Reader…wow, you could have a whole heap of bookmarks for various topic Grazers.

Or make your own Grazr and use OPML includes for each topic OPML, this Grazr could be like your Favourites for OPML topics…I guess we will see OPML directories get out of hand in the future.

Wink just released its Beta 2, and its main focus is a search engine for the human indexed web.

Wink is also a social bookmarks service, and a social list (collections) service, it also allows you to tag yourself.

When you create a collection you can add bookmarks from your “My bookmarks” or enter outside URL’s, if you do enter an outside URL into a collection, this won’t also be added to your bookmarks, it will just live in the collection.
I’d like to browse the whole of Wink to add a URL to my collection, actually you can do this when browsing any URL in Wink, but you can’t do it when you are in the Collections section.

You can describe the collection with tags, but if someone clicks on a tag from the tag set in your collection, all it does is do a general search in Wink.

This is the same with profiles, if someone clicks on a tag from your profile (tags you choose to describe yourself, essentially people tags), again it just does a general search.

Bookmarks are different, if you click from your “My Bookmarks” tag set you will see only your bookmarks with this tag

…but if you browse your stream of bookmarks, and click on a tag next to the bookmark title, it will show everyone’s bookmarks with that tag. Actually it just does a search for the tag name, and brings up results that may not even have that tag, but the term may appear in the title.

So as you can see the focus is not tags, but search, tags in this system are a general search query.
Wink also is a meta-search service for the human indexed web, as it includes several other social bookmark services.

Winks power is in “searching” the social web, and even further refine the results in a social way by ratings…it also shows results from Google for the same search (for comparison).

Feedback

Ideally when I click on a tag in a Collection, I’d like to see other Collections with this tag.

When I click on a bookmark tag, I’d like to see other bookmarks with this tag only, I don’t want to see bookmarks with the tag term in the title or description or URL…I want tag browsing to be different than searching.

When I click on a people tag, I’d like to see other people with this tag.

See some related points at my post, All about social lists.

More

Here is a brief list on services that cover more than one area:

Human-indexed web (full-text meta-search)
- wink
…even rate hits in search results (this is social from start to end)

Bookmarks
- wink

Lists
- wink
- otavo

People Tags
- wink
- yedda
- ziki

Q&A
- yedda
- otavo

Personal Re-syndicated Content
- ziki

Built in blog
- otavo

Reading List
- ziki

And of course Squidoo, fanpop, hubpages, and Zimbio are part of this crowd.

Dennis McDonald has posted about a DIY opml feed grazer called Wizz RSS, not sure if it takes just normal links as well, ie. all the items in your OPML are not feeds, but links.

It’s not as powerful as Grazr, especially that you have to host the file yourself…by the way Grazr is hot at the moment.

Others:
Opod
Grazr
Bitty (this is an actual web browser)
Optimal
FeedMeme

Yedda is my favourite Q&A expert locator service, they have now released widgets for your blog.

There are two kinds, and more to come:

- The FAQ widget collects relevant questions from Yedda on your blog topic and displays them directly in your blog, so that you can always have fresh content for your readers.

- The Yedda Ask widget lets people ask directly from your blog questions related to your blog topics, which are posted to Yedda, with a link back to your blog.

The Ask widget is a clever idea, as it is getting Yedda out there into the blogosphere, besides the functionality of the widget it is a promotion in itself…plus questions asked from blogs will link back to the blog when browsing questions in Yedda (cross promotion I guess).

The only complaint I had about Yedda in the past is that you can’t direct your question at a specific person, eg. ask a specific person and cc: the rest of Yedda as usual…and of course Yedda will invite others to help with an answer (FAQQLY seems the opposite, it can direct a question to an individual or a group, but it can’t ask a question to the whole of FAQQLY).

Just wondering if people asking questions in the widget will think it is directed to the blog owner, perhaps the blog owner could be invited to answer the question by default…not sure if this happens.

The Knowledge Network (KN) seems to be an expertise locator, I’ll briefly mention the similar services so far.

NOTE: Fringe Contacts lets people tag each other…Ziki allows you to do this in your personal network view.

Ziki also does a great job in getting to know a person, ie. once you have found a person, you can read their content (re-syndicated from the various services they belong to).

So with Ziki and Yedda you can find an expert via a people tag cloud…KN goes further than this as it combines SNA (Social Network Analysis) with an expert locator, it helps you find the most relevant person to you.

I’m not sure if KN will allow you to browse a people tag cloud.

NOTE: Yedda is different than Ziki, as it is a Q&A service rather than a personal content service, although both are expert locators.

In KN, a user can manually assign themselves keywords, or let the system mine specific email folders, and email and IM contacts.

It doesn’t just scan your IM and email to assign keywords, but it also uses this as an SNA tool.

eg. if there are 2 experts about “blogs”, and you have corressponded with both, or corresponded more with one of these people, then this person is chosen as the most relevant expert for you.

NOTE: this is not document search, and it’s not a Q&A srrvice, it’s people searching and profiling.

What I like about Yedda (expert locator and Q&A service), is that if you can’t find an expert, then you can just ask a question to the community, and Yedda will also go further and invite Yedda users to answer your question (these users profiles are matched to the text in your question and the tags in your question).

The way KN works is you allow the system to mine your contacts and various email folders, it will then suggest keywords and contacts, and you can choose to accept these, or create your own.
This will happen on a frequent basis, this will keep up with what you know currently, what type of a topic expert you are now compared to 2, 6, 12 months ago. This also applies to your social network, who are your current important contacts.

One of the KN blog posts says that so far it is trying to extract concepts/meaning from emails as this document format seems the most rich with tacit knowledge. To add more document sources would require more time and money and fine tuning.

Benefits

Another of the KN posts, goes through the benefits:

- people are lazy to manually describe themselves (and will they be accurate), mining your emails is an alternative, as it is honest and real…but, the system may not be aware you’re an expert at something unless it is frequently apparent in your email content.

- updates make sure that new contacts you frequently deal with and new topics you have become proficient in are added to your profile.

- bad recall (can you honestly remember all your important contacts or your social network, well you don’t have to as KN does it for you)…this also applies to all the skills, topics you are good at, but have forgotten.

- most expert locators result in certain people reaching burnout due to over demand, KN attempts to hook you up with an expert, but the most relevant expert to you

- personalizing contacts and keywords according to your social relationship with others (SNA), helps you find not only the expert, but perhaps the expert you are most familiar with, but not only that, in a timely fashion.
From their post:
“…when your colleagues use SharePoint Server’s search facility to try to find someone with a particular area of expertise or particular contacts, the KN server responds to the query with personalized results that are displayed according to social distance and inferred relationship strengths, which were calculated by the innovative algorithms that we’ve developed.”

- this post, also mentions a search where you can find people who know someone (this extends the SNA concept, I wonder if from these results it would choose an appropriate person for you).

Here are some screen shots of KN…and a video.

I really think expert locators are going to take off for knowledge management, sharing information in repositories may be a help, but connecting with the author can give me context and insight into how they think…it also helps form relationships, this is much more tacit sharing than previous methods.

Related:
The different ways of finding experts
Microsoft and Enterprise Web 2.0