Library clips

There are lots of services that allow you to re-syndicate the contents of an RSS feed, I have a list here, Feedo Style being the most comprehensive.
On my blog I am currently using a service called RapidFeeds, this allows visitors to grab a box to put on their blog which will re-syndicate the headlines of my blog. You can also use it to display your latest posts, but I use FeedZilla for this as I like the small scrolling window, I’d prefer Feedo Style, but they aren’t a free service.

What’s happening at the moment is that widgets are taking over, you can now re-syndicate an RSS feed into a widget…CleverClogs points to mashable’s post about RSS widgets using MuseStorm.

Why are widgets better?

- you can put a widget on your blog sidebar of your latest posts, then a visitor can, with one click, copy that widget and put it on their blog, or startpage, or anywhere a widget is welcome…you can also put a widget on your real desktop.
- your widget also lives in a gallery, at the service you create it in eg. MuseStorm
- you can track metrics/statistics for your widget (similar to what Feedburner does for your feed)

In saying this RapidFeeds does most of these things: re-syndicate posts, button to add the re-syndication panel to your own site, and track statistics…but it doesn’t live in a gallery, it can’t be put on your desktop and it doesn’t have the flare, versatilty, customisation and hipness of widgets.

As I mentioned I use RapidFeeds for people to copy my headlines and take elsewhere, and FeedZilla as a ticker that re-syndicates my latest posts in a scrolling fashion. Well it seems I can now use a widget instead to do both these things: show latest headlines, and allow people to take these headlines to put on their own site, with the bonus of promoting it in a gallery, and getting metrics.

Also note that Feedburner has overhauled their Headline Animator, basically a widget that re-syndicates your posts. You can make all different sorts, some are real small suitable for inclusion in an email signature, and others even allow you to listen or watch posts.

So an idea is not only to have a widget on your blog sidebar that re-syndicates your posts, but also to have the Feedburner ticker type widget at the end of all your blog posts…or use a widget service to do this.

Only thing is that when you click on a post in the Headline Animator it only goes to the feed homepage, in contrast with FeedZilla or widgets it goes to that post. I’m told using Buzzboost that posts will point to the post page and not just the feed home page, I’m also told that you can perhaps alter the code in the Headline Animator to do the same thing.

Let me know, if anyone out there can modify the code so that when you click on a post in the Headline Animator it will go to the actual permalink of that blog post instead of the feed homepage (landing page).

Cleverclogs also points to Flaremaker as an alternative to using the Headline Animator, it seems clicking on a headline will take you to the actual blog post.

Feedburner also has another widget offering by teaming up with SpringWidgets. I guess the difference here is that you can read posts in the widget, and visitor can copy the widget…I still see this as very similar to the Headline Animator, maybe these could be merged somehow into the one feature. Feedburner also offer Buzzboost as another re-syndication feature, RSS to HTML, I really think these 3 features could come under the one module, as they are all variations of the same idea.

Anyway similar to MuseStorm, visitors can take it and put it onto a webpage or on their actual desktop…more.

Mashable mentions other widget services tracking statistics besides Springbox (I take it Feedburner will introduce metrics in the future) and MuseStorm, such as Widgetbox and ClearSpring.

[ADDED 2/02/07: Widgetbox now has Blidgets - make a widget of your blog, and get stats.]

[ADDED 1/03/07: Beon-RSS Factory RSS widgets for your desktop so far]

[ADDED 20/03/07: yourminis blogwidgets]

The other day I posted on Twitter Tours, and thought how awesome it would be to have a kind of visual timeline of your Twitterings…also see my post on how to use Twitter.

More than a calendar of your posts, but an actual horizontal line where you could choose an hour, 6 hours, 12 hours, a day, 2 days, 3 days, a week, etc…Each post in your timeline is an icon, just hover over it to see the post. A timeline for your posts including your friends posts would be awesome.

MyTimelines is a start, here is an example on the sidebar of this blog.
Enter your Twitter feed into MyTimeLines and create a widget, only if you could drop it into your Twitter template.
This way you can navigate your Twitter posts by a visual timeline, which also shows how heavy you posted on a given day using vertical bars.

MyTimelines has come from the help of SIMILE Timeline, check out the example of the JFK Assassination. Imagine you could generate a timeline like this where it would chart you and your friends postings (time on the x-axis, and people on the y-axis)

Sparklines could be useful to chart Twitterings. Or the idea of bstat Pulse, I’d like to see a line like this to chart my post frequency.

Another timeline service I have come across is RSS2Timeline, doesn’t seem to work with my Twitter feed, let’s see with my blog feed (it works, but not really).

I’m really interested in stats for my Twitter posts, just like the stats for my RSS reading with Google Reader.

As I mentioned in my past post, I’d like to cut a section out of this timeline or zoom in to mark an event that started from Time A to Time B. I’d like this to have permalinks, this way I can go to my Twitter sidebar and click on my day at the Zoo, and see the vertical stream of posts from Time A to Time B, and also a horizonal timeline view…adding pictures would be the next step, ie. MMS twitterings.

In my last post I also mentioned Joe Regers most unique datablogging service, most relevant are the time periods, and episodes.

Check out my post for an explanation of these two features.

I like both these features, but what I’m interested in most is applying an episode to a Twitter, kind of like a category. For each post you may choose to assign an episode if you like eg. my 5 hour walk home. On each post you can see a timeline of all the posts in that episode, and click on them to read them. All these episodes are features on the sidebar of your Twitter…so they are like categories, but of a different context.

If we bring Timelines into it, these posts within my 5 hour walk home episode, can also be part of many Timelines, such as “living in my house in the hills”, “working with this company”, “playing with this band”, etc…

[ADDED 19/03/07: Twittervision : real time map]

A while back Bokardo wrote a post about structured blogging and who it benefits…Joshua included a few links in the post to people who think bloggers have the least to benefit, and that the system can be gamed.

This may be all true and I’m not sure myself how you can get the masses to blog in a structural template, it has to be hardwired in the blogging software, and then there is the lazy factor.

I’ve posted in the past about structured blogging in general, but this post is more on the personal value of structured blogging, and this is very apparent in a service that I’ve mentioned before called datablogging.

Back to Bokardo’s post for a second, the insight on the personal value of structured blogging, may drive the aggregate value, people need to firstly have a personal benefit…and I believe that’s how the del.icio.us lesson came about.

In this post about the del.icio.us lesson Bokardo links to and explains the personal benefits of datablogging. It seems datablogging doesn’t have to be your usual type of blogging, it may be that you would like to input data (figures/numbers) to later see a timeline, graph, etc…version of your data, in order to make inferences, etc…This is very much so a type of knowledge blogging, gaining some insight and being able to take action from all the data input. In many cases this is more logging than blogging, in fact this format of publishing in this instance are called logs.

The classic example is what Joe (the developer of datablogging) refers to as the slut factor, this is an example of datablogging, here is the excerpt:

“About three years ago a young woman decided to track her sex life with Reger.com’s datablogging service. She was using a Sex Log that tracked sex partner, intimacy rating, orgasm rating, who initiated, etc. And she decided to make it public. Of course, I immediately subscribed to it via RSS like any good horny geek would

Until she tracked the data, graphed it and analyzed it. Datablogging had given this young woman insight into her life. For me this was a watershed moment in datablogging. It was proof-of-principle that datablogging can help us learn about ourselves in ways that other tools can’t. Sure, she probably had an inkling as she dropped trow for that fifteenth guy that maybe she was slutty, but datablogging brought it into conscious focus for her… a graph representing her sluttyness… her slut factor.”

I can’t see why datablogging hasn’t taken off in many industries, it’s different than straight up blogging, from this example it enables you to over a period of time discover, trends and behaviour…how perfect would this be in the sales industry, etc…

At the moment it is more prominent in the personal arena, such as fitness logs, pregnancy logs, etc…Joe sometimes refers to it as a personal nostalgia repository (personal value) and how data could be even easy to capture in the future (but to store it all).
Actually the personal value post is interesting as it mentions that value in datablogging grows over time, just like some old photo’s. This is contrary to most information that is of no value after a certain time, eg. stockmarket, etc…

Maybe they could also be called attention logs, as it records very immediate and personal stuff.

Joe has a great take on Continuous data and Schema data, mentioning that schema data, much like the structured blogging concept, requires a certain scale to show any group context value.

Features

Let’s check out some of the unique features of datablogging, and the different logs that are available, note that you can even modify the log templates to suit your needs.

Location - each entry can be attributed to a location (users can see entries for a particular location), also has GPS coordinates for a location.

Activity-Specific Log Types - this is the range of logging platforms

Prebuilt and custom charts and graphs - overtime see a visual representation of your logging…here are some screenshots. Even build graphs from search queries, see more. Another thing is you can link to a graph from each entry.

Multiple logs - as many as you like…see the admin page.

Private logs - choose public or private

Social network - see your friends most recent posts, you can even message them and you also have an inbox

Mobile - post from your phone, even pictures, also post from email

Time periods - set time periods in your life, this also crosses over to aggregate posts from your various logs.
Do this by setting up a start/end time or you can make it open ended. Then when you post a log entry it will automatically fall into the time periods that you have set.
This way you can see all the different time periods a post was happening in, and from each post you can view all posts in a time period.
Eg. if you post about “failing school”, in the future you can look back and see that this post happened in the time periods (moving house, breaking up with girlfriend, don’t like my job). In hindsight you can see in context probably why you failed school, by looking at all the emotional stuff that was happening at the same time. Then from this post you can click on a time period, eg. moving house, and see all the posts in this time period…here’s a screenshot, and another.

Episode - these connect posts together, it’s kind of like a category, you are just choosing to mark a particular post as part of an episode. Within each post you can see all the other posts within this episode.
So unlike Time Periods, this is something you have to mark for each post, like adding a category for each post. Here is a screenshot.
This is something I want to see on Twitter.

There is loads more features, I just listed the most unique features…as you can see this is a new tyoe of blogging, it has a more intimate purpose.

If you want to learn more, see here.

Here are some examples of business logs.

Here are some example of personal logs, the classic example is Ronny the Runner, he logs to keep track of his runs, to see how far he went. In hindsight he can see his performance by generating graphs and charts from this log and make decisions from this information…this is personal knowledge management, a classic example of data (logs), to information (charts), to making decisions and taking action (knowledge).

You can also create custom logs in 5 steps: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

datablogging has been round for a while, I thought there would be more copycats, maybe it’s ahead of its time. I do like the idea of recording and documenting your personal life, we all like looking at old photo’s and reading old journals, well this is that sort of thing to the extreme.

Bronwen from PerthNorg, put me onto Tangler, saying it had some features in common with Twitter.

What is Tangler?

Read/Write Web says:

“It is a group interaction and communication platform which combines chat and forums, and delivers it as a web service”

Another aussie app coming soon is 3eep…what is 3eep?

Is Sydney Australia becoming Silicon Beach?

Check out my post on aussie blogs, lots of these are web 2.0 companies.

Planet Minibox is yet another chat box for your blog sidebar…see the list.

Meebome and Plugoo let visitors chat with you via the box and you use your IM to chat back, it seems Planet Minibox isn’t the same, like the others it is a shoutbox, meaning that you, like the visitors have to chat using the box.

What sets it out from the rest is that you can have tabbed private chatting, check it out.