Library clips

Just a note to let you know that I’m taking a month break from blogging.

I started this blog with the first post on 7 Feb 2005…that’s a long time without a break!

Most blog services allow you to publish a post via a blog editor, via email, via your mobile phone, etc…my phone even has a direct “blog this” feature to blog photo’s straight to a blogger mobile blog.

This on-the-go type feature as now flourished into a service of its own, Twitter, is by the innovative bunch at Odeo..this is focused on SMS blogging.

Twitter take care of the costs, all you do is SMS your blog post to a number (40404) and your entry will appear in your very own SMS blog.

Each post has a permalink and you get an RSS feed.

Your entries also appear on the public timeline, ie. a river of news of the latest entries from all Twitter blogs.

Here is a sample of a Twitter blog, moreso it’s a user space…what really augments this service is that you can have a public timeline limited to just your friends, with a feed as well, to keep up with your friends latest on-the-go posts.

Even better, I can run “my friends timeline” RSS feed through Rmail and get email updates on my phone. Actually, looks like you don’t have to, as phone alerts is built in as part of the service, ie. when you SMS a post to your Twitter blog, your friends can choose to receive this as an alert on their phone.

I wonder if comments for each post would be a good idea, or trackbacking someone that you talked about them…if someone leaves a comment or trackback, you would get an alert.

There is also a widget for your blog sidebar…not a bad idea, people reading your blog can view your latest Twitter posts.

You can even try out Twitter without giving your mobile number, this means you can only update your Twitter blog via the web, and not on the go (kind of defeats the purpose, but still it’s a good idea for those who may want to try out this service and not commit.)

Check out cool hacks like Twittermap, more at the blog.

See help for more, also see the lingo.

[via Gigaom]

The other day I posted on how much I love the new Google Reader; it’s speed, mark/unmark and flag each item, the auto-marking as you scroll, and especially the clippings feature.

My difficulty is that you can’t add your own text to any of the clips, unlike the Bloglines clip blog…actually the Bloglines clip blog allows you to write your own posts without having to clip anything.

My other concern was that you can’t include content into a clip blog that is coming from outside of Google Reader, or in Bloglines for that matter.
A clever tool called reBlog allows you to clip to a clip blog from the RSS Reader, and it also has a bookmarklet to clip pages you come across outside of your RSS Reading.

Anyway I was thinking of a workaround, I haven’t tried this, but it might just work.

Ingredients:

Google Reader

Clipmarks

Feed Digest

SuprGlu

Rmail

Here’s how

You can set up a clip blog for each friend, so you can share links you come across with ease…way more automated than emailing them everytime, and you have a blog showing your past and present efforts (this is more open and sustainable knowledge sharing over the email model).

1. Google Reader - when you see a suitable item tag it with your friends name, and this item will appear on that tags clip blog.

If the clip is suitable for another friend as well, just tag the item with that tag as well, and the item will appear in both clip blogs.

NOTE: in the settings click public to share your clip blog.

2. clipmarks - this is a social bookmarking service that allows you to clip, annotate and save parts of webpages, each clip has a permalink and you can apply tags…each tag has an RSS feed.

Each time you find something outside of Google Reader you can clip it with clipmarks, and tag it with your friends name.

NOTE: I’d use clipmarks over del.icio.us, as del.icio.us will only bookmark a link to a website, whereas clipmarks will clip content, plus you can add your own text in each clip.

3. Feed Digest - get the RSS feed from the Google Reader tag clip blog and the RSS feed from clipmarks tag and splice them together at Feed Digest.

Actually you can skip step 3, as you can enter both these feeds into SuprGlu, and it will be spliced into a default feed.

4. SuprGlu - start a blog at SuprGlu, enter both feeds, now you will have a place to present your Google Reader and clipmarks clippings

5. Friend - can subscribe to the SuprGlu RSS feed

6. Rmail - run this feed through Rmail if your friends don’t like RSS Readers.

FeedRaider is similar to SpeedyFeed…you can make your own public RSS widget page, and you can even have tabs to other pages eg. each page could be a topic.

It has the best of both worlds, where you can view a widget per feed (deck) or a river of news (river).

Other alternatives are sharing public versions from start pages like PageFlakes, and Protopage.

Luis Suarez has written a review post on why some think RSS is not taking off, and he thinks the reasons are quite weak.

I think the basic reason is that it is not mainstream, wait till Microsoft take it to the masses, and then wait a year and see, there will be lots of feedback from general users, but I guess the idea now is to guess what these questions are going to be and build it into the experience.

I don’t use the word “experience” lightly, if we think about RSS from this perspective it will help us reveal in what ways people would like to consume it.

Pito Salas from BlogBridge started this off for me, and we had a bit of an email exchange…very obscure and abstract, as we are finding it difficult to formulate or articulate what we mean, but through exchange, and as we speak, ideas spark…

But his initial pondering is exactly along my lines, there is so much great information out there in blogland and feedland catering to every topic imaginable.

And not only that, lots of it is cutting edge, fresh, underground, just like many magazines…the difference is the author doesn’t work for a publishing house, so they say exactly what they want, they form communities, others interact, and ideas grow, and grow…

Anyone can publish, or lurk and leave comments…there is a massive amount of fresh news on any topic, some of it is: breaking news, other personal diary like, other academic journal format, magazine format, link blogs, etc…

Like Pito I have friends interested in various topics like, Archaeology, aliens, travel, gadgets, etc…if these people knew about blog/feed land, or better still, knew how to take it on and use it, then their information appetites would be met.

Not only that, their appetites would grow larger, as it is now so easy to inform and be informed in anything that interests you, plus you can be informed as it happens…you can even publish from your mobile phone to your blog.

I don’t read news, and journals as much, I follow blogs that I know will point me to this stuff…plus by the time an article makes it to a journal it is old news in blogland, and I would of probably been pointed to that article in a repository months before hand.
I’m not a blog snob, but sites need to have feeds ‘cause I ‘aint got the time to make house calls, and I like that a lot of bloggers link to stuff they have found, so I don’t have to do the running around, or subscribe to every feed under the sun.

Anyway the point is that alot of people aren’t aware that for any topic there is such good news out there, if only they knew…who knows maybe they don’t care as much as me, maybe they only need to visit a few sites a day, even if there was more maybe they wouldn’t care or have the time, maybe I’m living in a bubble. But at least let those few sites they visit be the cream of the crop, plus the other point is that you can personalise the content you follow eg. search feeds, filter feeds, splice feeds…

Issues

People need to learn RSS Readers, but soon they will be familiar with feeds in the IE browser or in Outlook…that’s the first thing, to know what they are, and this will happen if it’s in the products they already use, or made by the same company at least.

I think this is the first hurdle, to incorporate feed reading into everyday behaviour, just like reading emails…like I said I think it will happen when Microsoft take it to the world.
Imagine if Hotmail had feed reading, I think the word would get around.

Then where to find feeds, and how to subscribe…Technorati have a blog directory, and so do some RSS Readers, so this is a start.

I guess first people need to know what feeds look like, but better still, auto discovery via their browser will let them know if there are any feeds available.

It has to be as easy as adding “favourites”…click the subscription bookmarklet to see if this page has a feed, if it does click the feed you like and it will add it to your feed reader (subscriptions)…simple and smooth.

Perhaps non-heavy users would rather just pick a ready made feed set according to their tastes, again Technorati supply OPML for each blog directory topic (by the way the feeds in this OPML are limited to the feeds displayed on the 1st page, it won’t include feeds on page 2, etc…).

Maybe they’d like search feeds instead…anyway I think this is what needs to be nailed down, because they may know how to read feeds, but just don’t know how to find good feeds, and we can’t let this be the reason that the enigmatic RSS Reader or RSS reading experience is left out in the cold.

I like the idea of an RSS reader connected to the same service you browse for feeds, but this always isn’t going to be the same case.

NOTE: I guess we also need to use non-web terminology like channels, or streams, or subscriptions, etc…

What about finding pre-made feed sets or should I say news sources…and what about review sites as an alternative to following lots of blogs, I’d like to follow blogs that review….or even blog collectives on a given topic.

Examples

Feedburner VC spliced feed (a spliced feed)

Top 10 sources (follow 10 feeds that cover a topic)

Technorati Blog Directory - limit by authority, BlogBridge feed library (follow a spliced feed or OPML about a topic)

Corante Web Hub (re-syndicate content from a careful selection of cutting edge blogs about the “web”)

Zdnet, web2.0 Journal, Gigaom, etc… (group of house blogs, also re-syndicated into a master blog)

Actually the Corante Web Hub editorial blog is more like what I’m after…instead of following the spliced feed or OPML of all the Corante Web Hub blogs I can just get the cream of the posts from the editorial blog.

The BlogBridge feed library will one day show latest posts from each feed, and the announcement blog could be used as an editorial blog.

Group blogs do a great job for what I’m after, multiple authors can cover lots of the blogosphere, and become synomonous with a topic, inducing lots of comments.
- TechCrunch
- Engadget
- World Changing

But even more accurate are review blogs:
- Global Voices have numerous blogs, each of these blogs rounds up the latest on the blogosphere
- Same goes with the Carnival review sites eg. Carnival of the Infosciences

I suppose you can let technology do the round up of stories for you, that is the idea of a memetracker like TailRank, megite is similar, especially MyFeedz, where you can define a feed set or use the community feed set and ask it to churn out content according to topics you set, plus it will cluster similar and related stories, plus you will only see hot posts, saving you from reading all posts, which can cause overload.

I’m trying to find ways of getting packaged content without having to find numerous feeds and then filter out content, or put up with overload.

Recap

This is essential for RSS newbies:

- learn how to use an RSS Reader (incorporate it into tools they already use)
- where to look for feeds (incorporate it into tools they already use)
- subscribe to feeds (auto-discovery from the browser and gives you the choice to save it in your browser subscriptions or email subscriptions or dedicated RSS Reader, or saves it across all)
- deal with overload (people aren’t going to filter feeds or do it clecerly if they do, and search feeds can cause an overload of content, so it is essential to find topic feed packages or to incorporate memetracking)

How feed finding can be easier:

- packages of feeds like BlogBridge feed library, Technorati Blog Directory, Top 10 sources, etc…
- group blogs that are mecca type sites eg. Slashdot, TechCrunch, digg
- review round up sites are even better (instead of subscribing to 10 feeds, subscribe to 1 editorial feed)

The system will feed your tastes

But it seems Pito is also harping on another point:

- tell the system what you like, and it starts delivering you stuff about that topic from sources you never even knew existed. So this is not even subscribing to feeds, this is, have trust in us and subscribe to one of your channels, and well do the rest.

I can see this being fine tuned via tracking reading behaviour or voting…but different than advanced personalisation RSS Readers like: Attensa, Rojo, Feeds2.0, and different to others like Findory, Spotback, etc…

This is all based on the feed set:
eg. tell MyFeedz topics you like and you shall receive, or let MyFeedz define topics for you…and you can do all this according to your own feed set if you like, instaed of using the system feed set.

Then Pito is maybe steering away from the RSS Reader or at least its traditional format, and why not, RSS Readers don’t have to be similar to an email format, maybe it can be like TV channels.

Maybe all the behind the scenes can be RSS, but the delivery can be an email digest, that is, if you don’t want to visit your TV channels website.

There’s lots of ideas floating here:
- ready made feed packages (channels)
- reading content outside of the 2 or 3 pane concept (widgets on a start page, or a print newspaper metaphor, or TV channels, etc…)
- non-web terminology

Here’s my bit

Pito’s thinking TV, I’m thinking traditional newspaper…I’ve harped on about this for some time now, and some email contacts have shown me works in progress, I just wish they had time and the contacts of their own to flesh their ideas.

The following posts follow this concept:
RSS Daily Newspaper
myBroadSheet as an RSS Newspaper
RSS Star : RSS Newspaper

In my explanation I tend to sway from the TV metaphor to the traditional newspaper metaphor.

Here I go, it’s basically got the SimplyHeadlines idea mixed with MyFeedz and something new, but this idea has been floating around before these two services released

- Browse a feed directory
(Flick channels perhaps)

- Graze content of feeds
(Watch what is on before you choose to stay on that channel)

- Tick box of that channel, surf other channels, tick box of channels you like

- Look at your list of cool channels (OPML) and subscribe to make your favourite channels list

- Then maybe read your feeds like you watch TV, click on the remote control and read your channel…your favourite programs are time shifted, always there for you to read (perhaps mark seen or keep unseen).

In this example you go to me.tv, or whatever, to read your stuff, this is the same place you found your feeds.
Maybe you can even browse a topic directory of a ready pre-made feed set eg. Top 10 Sources, BlogBridge feed library.

Going to the Newspaper metaphor:

- once you have your favourite channels or news sections, you can create topics

- this way you don’t have to read every post from your feed set, you can read posts only if they appear in a topic (these are kind of like smart feeds or search feeds within your subscriptions…perhaps you don’t make your own feedset and just use the massive system feedset or a portion of it, and make your topics).

So far this is like MyFeedz…the concept of entering an OPML (feed set), and then creating topics tags (I suppose this is kind of like search feeds, but more concept based), and then reading content by topic.

Or perhaps you can divide your feed set into topic sections (ie. folders), or perhaps you can choose a ready made topic feed set.
Then choose to read all posts from each feed, this is no different to a regular RSS reader, but the difference is changing from the 2 or 3 pane format, that is, reading your news sections in a non-linear format, I say read content in a traditional newspaper format.

If a section of your newspaper is called “cars” (search feed for the term or concept “cars” across your feed set) or (feeds in a folder called “cars”) or ( a search for “cars” across the system feed set), which stories will be the big or small editorials, and where on the page will they sit.
Maybe this can be based on how popular these stories are according to the blogosphere.

So there you have it, read feed content in a structure like a local newspaper, get it delivered to your inbox, or at least a link to it, or print out your newspaper.

The service can make money with ads, just like traditional newspapers.

I’d love to sit on the train amongst all the other commuters reading their choice of a handful of profit driven newspapers, where I will be reading my free, self generated, citizen authored personalised print newspaper.

This would really take off in the enterprise.

I’d really like to see this idea happen, maybe Pito (BlogBridge) can hook up with Chris (Touchstone), to flesh out the concept.

[ADDED: I like the Windows Live Search OPML Generator, where you can search for feeds, and select them into an OPML…but then you have to know what to do with this OPML]

Basically TailRank is a memetracker, it is also a personal memetracker like megite…enter your OPML and find the hot news from these feeds, it will all cluster similar/related items from the rest of the blogosphere.

A new feature is to memetrack just one feed or post:

Enter a URL of a blog eg. TechCrunch, and you will see that each TechCrunch post has a cluster of similar/related posts from the blogosphere…and you can also track a single post (thread) by RSS or IM.

At the moment I’m using Sphere to find related posts to my blog, but TailRank is much more, because it gives some sort of thread and context feel.

I suppose I could just have my own feed in my megite OPML, this way it would show related posts from the blogosphere…I could probably also do this with WizAg and MyFeedz.

See the blog post for the latest additions.

ResultR is an interesting way to create your own meta-search engines, or just use it as it is.

Click on create engine, choose engines from different categories, then give it a name.

Create as many as you like:
- your home page will have a list of the meta-engines you have made
- even grab some code (widget) to put on your website

I have made a new OPML Directory (via OPML Workstation) that consists of a few reading lists from:

- My Technorati Favourites
- Memetrackers/Recommendations
- Google Reader

I could of kept going and added my whole life in this widget.

Top 10 OPML & RSS

Top 50 OPML & RSS

OPML Directory

Search my Top 50

Check out my Top 10 (alternative OPML for my Top 10)

Who Subscribes to Library clips

Other ways to make a Reading List besides Technorati favourites:
See these two posts from a while back.

Some of the public RSS Readers generate an OPML:
- Blogdigger groups
- Kinja
- Top 10 sources
- MySyndicaat (I think)
- Feedbite
- Feed Collectors
- Bozpages

Ooops, did I mention the BlogBridge feed library.

NOTE

Some of the feeds from my Technorati Favourites do not work as these blogs are not indexed by Technorati:
Library Stuff
Anjo
A feed is born
Peter Scott
Feed Files
Gigaom - software

And some feeds are not picked up by Grazr properly:
Digital Inspiration
Knowledge Jolt with Jack
A Consuming Experience
3spots
Dennis McDonald’s ALL KIND FOOD Recent Postings

The Windows Live Search OPML Generator creates an OPML containing feeds of your choice based on a search.

Basically enter a search term, and it will match blogs/feeds about that topic, then select the one’s you like and generate an OPML.

What a great idea, why didn’t Technorati Blog Directory think of that, or any of the other blog directories?

Actually what I’d like to do after generating the OPML is to graze it in Grazr, and do some window shopping before I decide to load in this OPML to my RSS Reader.
If there are feeds I don’t like, I could perhaps delete them from my OPML, before I load them in.

I like this idea, especially for novices, as finding feeds is the problem at the moment, I think anyway:

1. Browse a feed directory or search

2. Tick the feeds you think you want (perhaps do another search and keep adding feeds to your bucket)

3. When you are done, graze your collection to see if you like what each feed is about

4. Once you have grazed and pruned your list, then load in the OPML to your RSS Reader

NOTE: Refering to step 1, instead of creating your own collection, you may want to browse the ready made topic package directory, kind of like the BlogBridge feed library or the Technorati Blog Directory.
Graze this, perhaps prune it, then import.

Related are keyword search generators and others:
OPML Generator
Social Bookmarking RSS Feeds - OPML Generator
KebberFegg
TagJag
Feedshow OPML Builder
Persistent News Search OPML Feedroll Generator
OPML Generator - Input
del.icio.us Reading List form
pageLinks2OPML

They all generate an OPML, but the different thing about Windows Live Search OPML Generator is it is not generating RSS search feeds all packaged into an OPML.
Instead you search in a feed directory, and choose the feeds you like, then generate your OPML…so the difference is these are feeds, not search feeds.

OPML is handy for a lot of uses, basically it packages data for exchange or browsing at a GUI.

This type of data, can be recorded data, like Attention data, or a feed list, or a link list, or a text book outline, or an OPML Directory, or a combination,
etc…

Let me know if you know of any other OPML uses, here are some things I’d like to see using OPML, most of these are in their basic stages of development.

Search in an OPML

Just say I had an OPML URL for one of my del.icio.us tags, and I wanted to full-text search all the bookmarks within this tag…the idea is to enter this OPML into a search service and then enter a search term, and you are off.

Now just imagine I made my own OPML (at a place like OPML Workstation), maybe this OPML could contain lots of folders composed of links, feeds, texts, and wait, other OPML’s. That’s right, an item in my OPML can be another OPML (called an include), I could add heaps of these to my OPML.

Just say each of these OPML includes had includes of their own, and so on…this would be a huge OPML Directory.

Now if I enter this OPML URL I would be searching full-text across a massive directory, or I could take one of the OPML includes from my OPML and choose to just search within that…more.
This could lead to communal topic engines.

Subscribe to an OPML or get services to subscribe to your OPML

Be able to plugin my OPML anywhere, so when I update my OPML all these services I have it plugged into are updated.
It seems every service I join I can only add feeds, or an OPML file…even if I can add an OPML URL, it is just for the purpose of batch loading.
BlogBridge is the pioneer, why not when you join a service (like the myriad of RSS Readers I try out), get it to subscribe to your OPML itself, instead of just batch loading the feeds via OPML.

Now that OPML’s are not just files, they can be an OPML URL, why not take advantage of the potential dynamics.

I just noticed that Share Your OPML (SYO) also subscribes to you OPML, when I made changes to my OPML, thay were reflected to the OPML I shared at SYO.

I’m trying to get Ziki to do this, and other services I share my OPML with.

OPML archive or latest posts for your blog

Wrap all my blogs posts in OPML…basically a blog archive.
- OPML for latest posts (this post points to a bookmarklet that will identify the blog post title links on your blog homepage and wrap them in OPML.)
- The above bookmarklet scrapes the blog homepage for blog post title links, you could also do this for a blog post category or month page

BUT, since it just scrapes the title links on a given page (home page, category or month) this makes it limited to the latest posts only.
So, if one of my blog categories spans over 5 pages, the bookmarklet won’t work as it is only useful for one page.

Why do I want to do this?

Well I could pop an OPML for each month of posts or category in Grazr in the sidebar of my blog, this way you could browse and read my whole blog in Grazr.
Or maybe you want to grab a month of posts and import the OPML into del.icio.us…maybe one day ie. grab a bunch of links and put them somewhere else.

Anyway, OPML Utils could be the answer, if only it would take off.

NOTE: check out The RSS blog, or the Rmail blog, you will notice that each month has an RSS feed, and all of these month feeds are wrapped in OPML.
The difference is that each month doesn’t just have the last few posts of the month, it has all the posts, so it is an archive.

This means you can graze an archive of this blog by month in Grazr, see what I mean:

Randy could put a Grazr on his sidebar, this way you could browse his blog in a small window, or as you see it is a widget on my blog, that’s amazing, you are browsing someone else’s entire blog on my blog.