Library clips

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.