Library clips

Leafletter is a great idea, it is basically a way to create a portable mini-website, which you can use as a widget on a blog or website. Make as many Leaflets as you like.

You could use it as a photo or art portfolio, an About us summary, a bio, a presentation, anything you like really…all that’s missing is video and audio.

Basically you can create a widget that has pages, each page gives you a choice of 36 layouts. The content you can put into a page is: photo’s (from your PC, a URL, or even browse Flickr within Leafletter) or text.
You can also choose if you want an image to display in full if it is clicked, and display information if you hover over the “i” icon. Once an image is in full I presume you can even click it to link to a website (in a new window), or for it to link to another page in the leaflet.
People can use the handy menu to access pages from your leaflet.

Here is an example:

Here is a link to another example.

NOTE: I presume the idea of leafletter came from the various Flickr hacks, and services like Slide, Tagloops, SlideShare.

I wonder if you could use Leafletter to embed a widget within a widget eg. within a page of a leaflet, embed a Slideshare presentation, amberjack or mapwing (site tours), evoca (audio), map, or a any widget from Widgetbox and the others. Website creation service Weebly accepts lots of widgets, I wonder if you could browse your Weebly website as a widget, this would cut right into Leafletter.

What about a leaflet within a leaflet.

Leafletter fits right in with the post I did on media mashups.

Robin Good has a step by step informative post.

Daylife is a news aggregator, trying to achieve the same thing as Google News, Topix, Inform, Spotback, TailRank, megite, techmeme, etc…
I suppose you could even include Topic Content Networks like, Boxxet and Zimbio…and Cit J services like Newsvine…and blog networks like Gather.

Basically it is a news portal, where you can choose a topic, people, places, organisations, timelines, photo gallery, quotes, top stories, highlights, bookmark stories to read later…see the tour.

I like that they have gone beyond just topic based news (I’d like to see sub-topics), but it is not very community driven or social (tags, ratings, commenting, posting)…also I’d like to limit news to just the blogosphere.
It looks like it is not meant to be a socially driven service, it’s more akin to a traditional news portal like Google News, with some personal customisation features.

TechCrunch mentioned there are no feeds (even for your bookmarked stuff), and commenting, and the front page stories are gathered by people…I guess not every new service has to be read/write web.

The MyWorld feature allows you to save bookmarks, search queries, people, sources, quick link sections (eg. topic, people, places), so at least there is old school customisation (by this I mean you are not quite interacting or contributing, you can just assemble your view).

All in all it achieves what Inform couldn’t do, and I’d like to use it over Topix and Google News. It’s good to see you can customise it like Google News Customised, and Spotback (this also personalises).

At first glance Yahoo! Pipes seems to be a way to re-mix feeds, all within a social network, straight away I think of Feed Collectors, Feedbite, and kinja, but it is way more than this.
It also lets you clone a pipe, as a basis for a new pipe, similar to the way Ning and Webjam offer for their products.

It seems to allow you to mashup feed data via a GUI…similar services are Dapple, Plagger, Teqlo, and QEDwiki.

It delivers pipe content to JSON, RSS, email and SMS…you can also search your pipe which generates a feed.

Yahoo! Pipes is the first sophisticated RSS masher, prior to this we have:

- splicing feeds
- boolean filtering (search feeds)
- MySyndicaat and Feed Digest even dedupe items with the same title or URL
- SuprGlu can splice feeds and then output content into author tags, MySyndicaat also outputs content via user tags, and also allows you to create a synonym ring (I don’t think these tags have their own RSS feed)

Splicing, deduping and filtering feeds is only a few of the features offered by Yahoo! Pipes, there is lots more data manipulation available, they call these modules.

More than just RSS mixing, it allows you to manipulate the data at a granular level, eg. translate data, scan for location metadata within the feed source, limit items in the feed, sort the items in the feed.

An example of how it stands out from other RSS remixers is that you can do things like take a news service feed and mash it up with a Flickr feed, this matches photo’s to news stories, see the New York Times thru Flickr.

Check out the overview and examples.

I’m finding it hard to understand how to use it, maybe I’m not techie enough, see TechCrunch.
It really needs to cater for users that aren’t familiar with the tech lingo, O’Reilly Radar explains it a bit more.

From what I see this is bringing mashups to the masses (I don’t mean the mainstream), only if the masses could understand how to use it. Some fans of RSS remixing may be a little frustrated as they have been waiting for this type of functionality, but find it hard to operate…arghh!

Newsmastering was first advocated by Robin Good and Rok Hrastnik was the biggest fan, and Richard MacManus told us a while back the RSS remixing was going to be huge.

See their articles:
Yahoo Launches Pipes, an RSS Remixer
Beyond NewsMastering: Yahoo! Pipes Is The Internet RSS Remixer - Overview And Reports
Yahoo! Pipes a Dream Come True for RSS Marketers … and a Huge Threat.

NOTE: There will be lots of data tinkering by the likes of Tony Hirst, and Marjolein Hoekstra.

RedBubble - An Australian site for hosting artwork in a social network environment. Add tags to your works, browse around and add friends and also add favourite works of art. But that’s not all, the power of this site is that you can sell your artwork/photos as prints and even framed prints…see my post on similar sites.
If your website already has a gallery of your artwork you can place a link next to each piece that is labelled “Buy a print”, and this can link to that artwork in RedBubble (the buyer is being taken to another website, being RedBubble, to make the purchase, but that’s ok).
They have widgets coming soon, so you will be able to promote your artwork on your website or blog, I’m thinking slideshow widgets are even better. Check out Abby’s (my wife) artwork.

txtms - create a virtual business card with details and a photo, people can access it by sending an SMS with your user ID to x@txtms.com. I wonder if there is space to enter your web 2.0 identity, eg. ProfileLinker, also see SocialNetwork.In, Profilactic, and Pidy. The ProfileLinker portable profile looks awesome, but it seems you need the mobile web to see it. I wonder if txtms could use MMS instead that way your card is a kind of slideshow or has fade out/in pages.
Even better, similar to Hictu, it could have a further purpose, you can SMS or MMS for a person’s contact/profile, and this will also tell you of their presence, whether they are online, their location (plazes), their IM status, maybe even a status message eg. “gone fishing, back at 7pm”. This is like a non-mobile web version of The Swarm.

Searchbots - create your own bot to trawl the web for you and report back…searches keywords, tags, locations

IMVU - desktop IM where your avatar is a 3D character, and you are in a virtual room with the person you are chatting with…the text appears as bubble captions. In this virtual room you can move and interact with the other person (not sure if you can have a group of people in one room). Just like buddystumbler and Tworl you are not limited to chat to people in your contacts list, you can chat to anyone (feels a bit like meeting a stranger in a room).
This seems like a feature you would have in second life, I can see it handy for business conference calls).
Also see other virtual words where you can chat citypixel, there, Hive7, moove, cyworld, faketown, Habbo Hotel, Gaia Online, and Wallop.
NOTE: When you finalise downloading IMVU make sure it doesn’t send an email to everyone on your email contacts list.

Swivel - charts and graphs social network

TechCunch has just announced that Photobucket will soon be releasing a workbench to mashup photo’s video and audio in a timeline, and take it anywhere as a widget.

Media mashups could become a really big thing, like blogs did for diaries and link sharing, media mashups can do for storytelling.

Let’s see what we got

Photo’s hosting - eg. Photobucket

Photo slideshows - eg. slide, rockyou

Pimp up photo’s - eg. Pikipimp these up

Audio slideshows - eg. fliptrack

Photo editing - eg. filmloop, picassa, Piknic, Fauxto, etc…

Art image hosting - RedBubble, DeviantArt

Scrapbooks - eg. scrapblog (inhouse pimping)

Presentation widgets - eg. Slideshare

Video hosting - eg. YouTube, (inhouse captions)

Mobile video slideshows - eg. cellblock

Video editing - eg. jumpcut, motionbox, and cuts

Audio hosting - eg. evoca (see my post), Pheeder (see my post)

I haven’t mentioned the many other bookmark type sites like: books, movies, codes, notes, wishlist, etc…

Media mashups

Bring it all together to tell a story or present your expressive art…digital mixed media at its best.

You could even use this idea to summarize your web 2.0 meanderings for the day.
At the end of each day mashup your blog posts, bookmarks, photo’s, video’s, audio posts, into a slideshow or film clip of your day.

So far the forerunners in mixed media mashups are:

Scrapblog

Tagloops

MixPo

Vuvox

Yodio (mobile)

[ADDED: Check out Leafletter : micro-website widgets]

[ADDED 14/02/07: Smilebox]

[ADDED 26/02/07: Pickle, and LifeTrackers]

[ADDED 13/03/07: Voicethread]

[ADDED 14/03/07: GotZapp]

[ADDED 5/04/07: Splashcast, read more.]

[ADDED 24/04/07: Panraven]

[ADDED 27/04/07: Flektor]

[ADDED 30/04/07: Our Story]

[ADDED 13/07/07: MemoryPress ]

[ADDED 23/07/07: MyWaves…similar to cellblock and pickle, also get a download for your phone so you can stream video]