Library clips

What I’d like to see Feedburner offer to each user is their own Feedburner blog.

But I don’t mean a traditional blog or even a HTML blog, what I mean is a spot where you can publish content to your Feedburner feed. Kind of the way you can publish content into your Top 10 Sources feed.

The idea is that the content that you post will not appear in your blog, it will just appear in your feed. The way you would turn it on is like the other splicing features eg. splicing in your del.icio.us links.

This could be used for announcements/updates that you don’t want to appear in your actual blog post eg. you may want to let people know that you just added a link to a past post.

The perfect service that they could align with is publi.sh, this service offers a feed and an admin space to post and manage your content, but it doesn’t offer a HTML public page for people to see your content. The only way people can see the content in your RSS feed, is in their RSS Reader, or a public RSS Reader, or re-syndicated as a widget, or spliced into another feed, etc…

NOTE: you don’t have to use publi.sh you can use any service that outputs an RSS feed like a traditional blog, or note service..if you used a traditional blog then you would have a public HTML page as well as a feed.

You can even post to publi.sh by bookmarklet or email, what about adding the power of IM like Sabifoo or even SMS like Twitter or Jaiku (NOTE: these last 2 services are a totally different concept…not sure if you can post to Loopnote via SMS).

If a service like pu.blish was a partner with Feedburner (just like del.icio.us), then you would activate publi.sh, and what ever you post will appear in the Feedburner feed.

You could post perhaps from within Feedburner, or from publi.sh, or even use their bookmarklet or email for easy posting.

Another thing you could do is re-syndicate your publi.sh feed as a widget on the sidebar of your blog.

Right now you can use publi.sh as a widget on your blog, acting like a side blog (just re-syndicate your publi.sh feed using one of the many services).

On top of this I would also like to see it spliced into my Feedburner feed, which is the focus of this post.

NOTE: If you started a new blog you could circumvent this by splicing your native blog feed with your publ.ish feed, then run it through Feedburner, but that’s too late if you already have a Feedburner feed.

For some background on this post, please read Splice in updates into your blog feed.

[ADDED 21/12/06: LinkRSS and my.notify are very similar to publi.sh]

Spokeo is basically an RSS Reader that is not so generic, it is more focused towards feeds from social networks. You can add any type of feed if you like, but the main focus is you can add URL’s from lots of social networks from within the service, and moreso your RSS Reader is within a social network of its own.

People using this service might not be even aware they are using an RSS Reader, this is where we need to head with RSS.
Lots of RSS Readers now have feed directories to easily add a feed, and like Spokeo, some also allow you to enter a social network user URL or tag URL and the system will find the feed and add it, this way you don’t even have to know what RSS is.

It’s a good idea for the social network addict that doesn’t really know what an RSS Reader is, now they can keep up with their favourite social network tags and users by using Spokeo…you could use an RSS Reader if you want, but it would be a more manual process, plus Spokeo has special features.

The big difference with Spokeo is that it is an RSS Reader within a social network, this is going a step further than a public version of your Bloglines account. I suppose social network newsmastering services like FeedCollectors, Kinja and others are similar, but this is more focused on making topic feed streams, whereas Spokeo is more focused on collecting social network feeds.

The feeds are organised into two default folders, “me”, and “my friends”, then within each folder you can access each subscription.

Not only can you can add tags and users from various services, or feeds in general, but you can also add another Spokeo user as a subscription.

The folder name “my friends” is not the best fitting, it should really be “my subscriptions”, but they are going with “my friends” as it is a heavily used social network terminology.

An interesting feature is that you can limit your river of news by service, eg. just show me a river of news of all my Spokeo user subscriptions, or just show me a river of news of my manual feed subscriptions, or just show me a river of news from my flickr subscriptions (if one of your subscriptions is a Spokeo user then it will also show the Flickr posts within this users account [if they subscribe to any]).

And of course you can click on a single subscription and read that, whether it’s a manual feed, flickr user or tag, Spokeo user, etc…

Not sure if you can limit content from one of your Spokeo user subscriptions, eg. show me a river of news of the Spokeo User “Eric”, then limit the content to just flickr.

Besides limiting a stream from just one service eg. flickr, you can limit a stream by content type, eg. show me posts from my various photo services subscriptions (including if one of my Spokeo user subscriptions includes their own photo subscriptions)…not sure if you can say, show me posts from various photo services from the Spokeo user “eric”.

Lastly you can mix it up and make your own custom limits from your subscriptions, ie. groups, kind of like folder river of news eg. show me a river of news from the flickr tag “beach”, the Spokeo user “eric”, and the RSS feed “Techcrunch”.

You can recommned/rate posts for a chance to appear on the home page, and this will also appear on your Spokeo friends page.

You can also comment on posts, and mark subscriptions as read.

In past posts I’ve harped on about creating an RSS feed for a single blog post. Reason for this is that some of my posts list a whole heap of tools eg. blog chat widgets. From time to time I will add new links to these posts, so how do I notify people about these updates.

Choices

- write a new post (that would be just silly)

- use a page scraper to create a Feedwhip or PonyFish RSS feed for that post…see here

- site search for a term in the post and use that as an RSS feed for that post…see same link above

- since a blog post can have its own comments RSS feed, you can add a new link to the blog post, then add a comment notfying people that you have added new stuff to this blog post…see here
Since the content in the RSS comments feed on each post will be displayed in the general comments RSS feed, it is best to write an explanatory comment:
eg. UPDATE on the post Blog Chats. New items added are…………..

- display an RSS feed on your blog post from a 3rd party, like Loopnote:
eg. if you regularly update 5 blog posts, you could make 5 Loops, and a feed from each Loop could be promoted on the corresponding blog post
Each time you update the blog post, you would then go to the corresponding Loopnote and post about the update.

SIDE NOTE: You could use a traditional blog instead of Loopnote, but who wants to create a blog just for updates, and you certainly don’t want to create lots of update blogs for each post

NOTE: Another option is to use a note tagger like Simpy notes, TagFacts, TextSnippets, Notetagger, Markaboo, etc…as long as they output in RSS.

- display an RSS feed on your blog post from a 3rd party that doesn’t have it’s own HTML page, all it has is feed content
eg. ShortText, publi.sh, Sabifoo (IM your updates), etc…

New idea

Most people know you can splice your del.icio.us links into your Feedburner blog feed, the posts of these del.icio.us links will not appear in your blog, but they will appear in your RSS feed.

So why not splice in an update RSS feed into your Feedburner feed…this feed could be a feed from any of the 3rd party tools like, Loopnote, ShortText, publi.sh, Sabifoo, etc…

After you update a past post, go to your update feed (eg. publi.sh) and type in your update.
Now this update will be a post in your blog RSS feed only, not the blog website.

The only drawback with this idea compared to using page scrapers like Feedwhip or Ponyfish (which are also 3rd parties I guess) is that once you update your blog post you have to also update your special update feed (which is spliced with your Feedburner feed), whereas the page scrapers will recognise the changes and automate a post on your behalf.
But then again using a feedscraper is going back to the old method of having a single feed for a blog post, whereas our new method is that it is spliced with your main blog feed.

NOTE: I’d find it handy if Feedburner had an option to splice in my Box.net feed (online file storage).