Library clips

I blogged about Feedburner getting into the basic newsmastering market back in August last year, the only network I was aware of was the VC network. I read on Quick Online Tips that it was now open to a select few for the beta release, so I headed straight for my account and I was fortunate to see the link “My Networks”.

UPDATE: Just before I went to publish this post we had a black out at home, so here it is a sleep later.

See an Overview and the Network Coordinator FAQs.

What you get is a stream of posts from the mixed feed of your network, now this public page seems to be a feed page not a usual HTML page.

Once you create a network you request other publishers to join, so it is more formal than the usual RSS Remixing.

Features

- Add a banner

- Sell advertising space

- Search with Lijit and Google CSE
I don’t get how they are using Lijit, as this searches a persons identity and well as their connections, whereas the idea here is to just search the feed list. Also if a feed is added or deleted then the Google CSE has to be uploaded with the fresh OPML, unless it is dynamic somehow, if it is tell me more!!!

- Subscribe by email

- Subscription list (each source links to blog and the feed)

- Spliced feed

- OPML

- Widgets for Grazr or Bitty

As mentioned it is different to other newsmastering services as you can only create a site with the consensus of the blog owners, so it is more official.

Basically what you create is a Public RSS Reading stream with some sidebar content, the output stream looks just like a feed landing page.

This is really simple newsmastering, ie. just splicing feeds, no filtering, reminds me of FeedPile, kickRSS, SuprGlu and Top 10 Sources.

Other newsmastering services have a social network feel like kinja, and Feed Collectors, and others are superpowerful re-mixers like MySyndicaat.

Technorati Favourites is another Public RSS Reader:
- find your feeds to add within Technorati (or add one manually)
- no filtering offered
- organise feeds in tags (read tag river of news or read by feed)
- OPML and RSS even at the tag level
- search your favorites, search one feed, but can’t search limited to just a tag…the search defaults to the tag you are looking at, so you can click a tag and search just those feeds
- generate search feeds

Kinja offers a lot of what Technorati Favorites does, only you can’t search within a feed or within a tag, actually you can’t search in your account at all.
It also leverages on all these tags to the community level, kind of creating a tag based blog directory, for any tag you can get a batch of blogs (including an OPML) and a river of news (including an RSS feed)…searching the sytem is like clicking on a tag, again you get an OPML blogs and an RSS river of news.

I know Feedburner Networks is basic newsmastering, but I’d like to be able to limit the stream to just one feed or a selections of feeds…and to be able to generate search feeds.

I suppose Feedburner Networks is most similar to the Google Reader automated clip streams.
In Google Reader you can organise your feeds with tags, each tag has an RSS feed output page and you can make it public (this page is not HTML it is like a Feedburner landing page).
This displays a clip stream just like Feedburner networks, only it lacks the feed source set on the sidebar and other links. So a lot of people are probably making content streams out there without even knowing it. In Google Reader you can even manually clip a feed item into a stream that it doesn’t belong to.

Google could really pay attention to these automated clip streams as you are publishing content by default just by subscribing to feeds, so now you can be a reader and publisher effortlessly at the same time.
NOTE: clips streams aren’t limited to the tags you organise your feeds in, you can tag any item manually and this clip stream can be made public, the easiest manual clip stream is “starring” items.

Besides not having access to beautify the content of the Google Reader clip streams and a sidebar, my other gripe is that it doesn’t have an OPML. As mentioned many times I’m after a unique OPML for my whole account and also for each tag (which is also a clip stream). The other thing is to also be able to clip outside content and perhaps inhouse posting, see Top 10 Sources for these great features.

BlogBridge Feed Library is another service acting more as a feed library rather than a content stream, but in the future it will also display content, and they already have a handy inhouse blog…I really think this has some potential.

Go explore.

NOTE: Another idea for a Network would to have tabs near the banner so you can tab to different networks, this is kind of like feed folders in a way.

Related:
Dynamic newsmastering with OPML

[ADDED 13/02/07: continued…More on Feedburner Networks]

Google Customised search engine allows you to create your own search engine, nothing different to Rollyo, see more.

NOTE: like Rollyo Google CSE searches in the HTML, not the feed content.

You can share your engine with others, add a site to your search engine via a bookmarklet, and add it as a widget to your start page or blog sidebar.

In the advance section you can upload an OPML file, as mentioned here and the link above it would be even better for the Google CSE to subscribe to this OPML. In the future when you add/delete sites from your OPML, it will automatically delete/add from your Google CSE. But I suppose my OPML Reading List from Technorati Favourites contains feed URL’s and not home page URL’s, but still it could perhaps discover the homepages from the feed URL’s.
In fact when you upload an OPML it does discover the homepages by looking at the htmlURL tag, see more:

“We currently accept OPML files such as those generated by Bloglines. The value of ‘htmlUrl’ attribute from each ‘outline’ element is added to the list of sites used by the custom search engine.”

Still I wish you could upload a URL instead of uploading a file, at the moment if I change my OPML, I will have to save it as a file and upload it to Google CSE. Instead if my initial upload was a OPML URL (not a file), then I would never have to worry about again as it would automatically update, as it is subscribed to my live OPML.

Here’s a how to on creating a search engine from your Google Reader OPML. But as mentioned in this article the moment you change your OPML, you will have to reload it in Google CSE.
What a hassle I’m adding/deleting feeds constantly, they should take a look at BlogBridge and FeedBlitz.

Also see how to use it to search your del.icio.us account.

One thing it lacks is the search menu that Rollyo offers, although Google CSE allows you to make multiple search engines, you can’t get one box where you can choose from a menu of which search engine you would like to search.

Imagine that possibilities this would have with OPML, you could upload an OPML that has lots of other OPML’s within it (OPML includes). Once uploaded you could use Google CSE to search the OPML, or one of the includes…kind of like being able to search your whole RSS Reader or just within one folder.

Related:

Meta-search via an OPML URL?
Google Toolbar searches my blog posts with one click
Google Mini Search for your blog
More blog search boxes