Library clips

Megite Memetracker

Matt from megite allows you to memetrack a Feedburner Network, what a great idea, here is the megite for VC-FBN.
This reminds me of what OPML Sampler did for the Web 2.0 Network, only megite is not just popularity, but clustering as well, with some recommended post thrown in…Network Memetracking.

People have been creating topic based content streams from spliced feeds since the days of Blogdigger Groups, the latest of these types of services is Feed Collectors.

I could go to a service like WizAg or MyFeedz and create a topic stream (like a Feedburner Network) and get stories ranked by populuarity including clustering, but these services just aren’t known by everyone.

Now that you can mix Feedburner Networks and megite people will be aware of this type of functionality as both these services are popular.

I think it is a great idea, first it was memetracking your personal OPML, now it is memetracking your topic OPML.

Too many posts to read at the VC Feedburner Network, then try read the succinct megite version (the stories that have made a bang…sorry the long tail…try PersonalBee for the long tail).

Editorial Blog

I mentioned a request in a past post for Feedburner to offer an inhouse feed for each feed.

This would work like splicing in your del.icio.us links, this content appears in the feed but not the HTML of your blog.
My suggestion was, from your Feedburner admin page, to be able to splice in an announcement feed, 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 updated a past post.

Similar services are Top 10 Sources, which allow you to post content within your automated stream, this content will appear both in the feed and home page. There is also Ziki, which allows you to post content into your stream, and Jaiku which does the same, even feedbite.

Most similar would be BlogBridge feed library, at the moment this is a place to create an OPML and share it, basically you enter a set of feeds and give them a topic name and also apply descriptive tags to your Topic. The plan soon is to stream the latest content, at the moment it is more of a feed library. Anyway each topic you create has its own inhouse blog to annouce of any changes made to your topic library.

So the idea for a Feedburner Network is to either mix announcements into the content stream, or have a widget on every network page that has announcements, this essentially would be its own feed.
If you could get into the template you could add any feed content into the widget, in this respect the feed wouldn’t need to be supplied by Feedburner.

Search - Lijit and Google CSE

In my post about Feedburner Networks I was wondering how a Feedburner Network is entered to create a profile in Lijit, eg. VC.

How is a group of people entered into a profile, is the spliced feed entered, or are all single feeds or blog homepages entered?

NOTE: A similar service Ziki, have a separate section to separate individuals from groups.

If the VC spliced feed is entered into Google CSE the search won’t work properly, it only searches the feed names. Same goes when you enter the VC page URL, it will search the HTML, but the links are not to blog posts, but to the blog homepage.

So I’m gathering that for search to work in a Feedburner Network (via Lijit, which is via Google CSE), each feed in the VC Feedburner Network is entered separately (Google CSE will recognise the htmlUrl element in each feed so it can find the blog homepage, as it searches HTML not RSS).

But then my question is if a new feed is added or deleted from the VC-FBN, then will this have to be manually done at the Lijit Profile, which will in turn updates at Google CSE (Lijit uses Google CSE as their backend, this link also brings to attention Google CSE’s selective results)?

Or do they do it dynamically, so this happens automatically?

Ideally, you could enter an OPML URL into Lijit, that is, not bulk loading lots of feeds in one go, but Lijit actually subscribing to the OPML URL…then when ever a feed is deleted or added to the OPML URL (eg. VC-FBN OPML URL), then this will be reflected at Lijit automatically.
And I suppose each time you add/delete a feed in a Lijit profile it gets reflected in Google CSE, but Google CSE doesn’t not subscribe to OPML URL’s, it only import OPML files, so Lijit must have a work around for it to work dynamically.