Library clips

As we all know by now Feedburner have released the 1st on their series on their view of the feed market, what I want to focus on is the 3 types of measuring feed statistics.

It was just the other day the I posted on how do we find out our true subscription number, as people may have subscribed to our feeds, but abandoned their RSS Reader. Is it really a subscription if it isn’t being read…it’s like mail still being sent to you when you have moved house.

Now Feedburner can get to more real numbers by looking at audience engagement measures via active feed loads (views) and feed item clicks (clicks).

NOTE: see the glossary.

Cumulative Subscribers - total times your feed has been subscribed to (MyYahoo! numbers are not included if subscriber has not logged in for 30 days)

NOTE: not sure if this number is provided as the subscriber count seems to be based on views (see below).

Feed items views - number of times your feed has been loaded today (this is real readership).

I think this is moreso if an item has been viewed, as technically your feed items may come from search or re-mixed feeds.

Feed item clicks - feed items that are clicked to read the native blog post
NOTE: I agree with TechCrunch, this means nothing for full-text feeds, as their is no need to click-thru.

But people may click through in order to bookmark your blog post, in this case this leads to another valuable statistic. How many and which of my blog posts are found worthy to be bookmarked, and in which services are they being bookmarked.
Not that this is really Feedburners job, but this would be an interesting statistic. I can get my blog domain URL history at various social bookmark services, but we need a 3rd party to track them all on our behalf.

Also note that Feedburner tracks site statistics.

Social Media Today is a content stream from various re-syndicated blog feeds in the social media blogosphere.

It’s powered by Blogtronix, what a great way to present your newsmastering or RSS Radars.

Corante Web Hub, now defunct had it re-syndication backend powered by MySyndicaat. All a service like MySyndicaat requires is a front end like Blogtronix to make it superb.

When I first looked at Social Media Collective I thought it was a meta-blogging system, where each person has their own blog, and the homepage streams a mix of the latest content. But in fact all the blogs here don’t live at Social Media Collective, they are just re-syndicated.
NOTE: I realised this as I subscribe to some of these blogs, finding I had read lots of these posts.

In contrast an example of a meta-blogging system is GigaOM, ZDNet blogs, and ITToolbox (this is much more).

At first site you wouldn’t know it is re-syndicated content, as it looks very much like the content is made within Blogtronix itself.

The only give away is the Reading List (list of bloggers) all link to their homepages. One gripe I have is that next to each blogger you should to link to an archive of their posts within Blogtronix.
Reason I say this is that you can look at all posts from one blogger, but you just can’t access these pages from the Reading List…here’s an example of all posts by Luis Suarez.

As you can see on this page you can get a feed from this author, I personally think they should be promoting the original feed. There is also a comments feed for this author.

Categories are also offered for this author, under the heading “Groups” for some reason, where’s the author’s tag cloud?

There is also a calendar archive of blog posts from this author.

Now this is a professional portal and all bloggers consented to their content being re-syndicated, otherwise it would seem like their blogs have been cloned.

Each author has a personal and work profile…imagine this portal had 100’s of blogs and each author could tag themselves, and the homepage had a people tag cloud. This would be an expert locator by explicit people tags or by content tags or search.

Back to the homepage…

- Reading List
- Categories
- Tag cloud
- News (in house announcement/editorial blog)…could BB Feed Library be a contender in the future.
- Archives
- Event Calendar (this makes this feel like a topic portal, the collective element)
- Wiki (this makes this feel like a topic portal, the collective element)
- Feeds/OPML (Posts, comments, news, events, wiki, custom feeds)

Notice it has “Custom RSS feeds…here you can subscribe to a category feed or generate a search feed. I tried holding down the CTRL key, but it wouldn’t let me select multiple categories.
And where are the individual blog feeds, and tag feeds.

They could go the whole way and offer splicing and filtering feeds, without needing to consult an outside party.

eg. Subscribe to category A from just blog A PLUS subscribe to blog B PLUS subscribe to search feed for term A PLUS subscribe to search feed for term B in blog C PLUS subscribe to category B PLUS subscribe to tag A.

Whoo, that’s a ridiculous re-mixed feed, but in the age of RSS overload this effort might lower your info stress levels.

NOTE: notice it says “RSS for this group”, meaning you can probably have several collectives, within the one website…ITToolbox is structured in this way, each collection of blogs is a topic itself. The advanced search also asks to search “this group only “or “all sub- groups.”

To the other sidebar….

- A widget (this means you can get into the template)
- Most read posts
- Recent comments
- Most read authors
- Search (advanced search)…my suggestion is searching as granular as the feed re-mixing listed above.
- Statistics
- Members (not sure what this is..ahh I think it is the internal blogs)
- Most discussed authors
- Most discussed posts
- Post with max rating
- Most active authors
- Highest rated authors

You can sign up and be part of the collective…this makes it official, invitiation or sign up yourself, declaring to share your content.

Here’s a cool idea, since the idea of this is a topic news site, how about a clustering memetracker feature, see Feedeye.

Now to Blogtronix…

It seems this system can re-syndicate feeds to look like internal blogs or you can infact use it as a meta-internal blogging system.

It is also described as a wiki and social networking solution and more…all that is missing is social bookmarking and people tags.

Check it out, they have a free edition to download, I’m so used to free hosting, can’t have it all.

This blog post explains it all, I wish I found this earlier.

Here comes another viral blog meme, Chris Saad has tagged me to share my media consumption diet.

These blog memes are great, and I’m glad my blog is not too formal to miss out. I like that our distributed blog communities can get to know each other a little more as friends do.

Web of course

Not just because I’m sitting at the computer, but the web is my type of media, for me I don’t pay, I have more media, types, breadth, than any other delivery channel. That’s the thing, the web is a media type, but it also delivers all the other media types, online newspaper, online TV, photo’s, video’s, music, etc…

OK so it’s obvious I’m very fond of the blogosphere.

Local News - PerthNorg

General News - If I did, I’d probably check out Daylife.

Two publishers that matter are WorldChanging and Global Voices.

I also subscribe to Techmeme in my Gmail webclips.

Twitter is fun, I use IM.

I subscribe to 3 or 4 forums and groups.

I hardly visit sites, it’s all RSS, I may visit a site after I’ve seen it in my RSS Reader.

What type of feeds - all blogs, a few websites, a few search feeds, a few journals.

Subscribe to under 300 feeds, this is way too many, about 20 I don’t read or I’m testing, and about 50 or so are blogs from services I use…so I guess I regularly read about 200 feeds.

TV

News, Current Affairs, documentaries, animation, and some trash like reality shows…oh yeah and a few series like Desparate Housewives, OC, Extra’s…

DVD

Watch about one every week or 2, plus we are building a cool collection: The Office series, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Donnie Darko, American Beauty, David Lynch stuff, and older movies.

Last film I saw was last night, Little Miss Sunshine…really funny character road movie.

Cinema

Don’t get there that often, and it’s expensive…last movie I saw was Notes on a Scandal.

I guess I’m not too web savvy with my TV/DVD/Cinema intake, but I do like the idea of programming your own stuff, Tivo or something like that.

Hmm, I don’t listen to podcasts, just haven’t got round to it, maybe I’ll see my dietitian.

Search

Google, Technorati, del.icio.us

Radio

Basically just when in the car, RTR is a great community station in Perth.

Music

I still buy CD’s, some times I get stuff online, last.fm is seriously good, but I haven’t the room in my diet, I wish I did.

At the moment I’m listening to mostly lo-fi electronica: Boards of Canada, Donna Regina, Savath and Savalas…

Newspaper

Sometimes on the weekend

Magazines

Not really…When I go to the news agents I try to find something I like, but my interests just aren’t on paper…I’ve bought the Economist from time to time…maybe I would buy Wired, not sure.

Books

I can’t get enough of reading, mostly lots of reading on natural medicine, shamanism, ethnobotany, anthropology

Delivery

- Google Reader
- Google Toolbar
- Rasasa (RSS to IM)
- email
- IM
- email on my phone
- Gmail webclips
- Gmail (FeedBlitz for one ot two feeds).
- music on PC
- music on mobile phone
- Newspaper
- TV
- DVD
- Books
- Radio in car
- Search engine

NOTE: Via Rmail I get RSS feeds sent to my phone email (my phone provider allows me to receive unlimited emails for free), these are usually the wordy blogs that I have more time to read on my phone when I’m on the train. I also noticed the other day that when I was listening to my voicemails, it also said that I have new emails do I want to listen to them…nifty!

I don’t really follow any verticals like Topic based remixed feed sites or social bookmark groups.

[ADDED 24/02/07: Ooops I forgot to pass the meme along, I tag Jack Vinson, Luis Suarez, Emily Chang, Improbulus, and Ken Yarmosh]

[ADDED 27/02/07: My 1Gig mp3 player (Creative Zen V Plus) plays video, so I have been watching clips on the train.]

del.icio.us needs more metadata input fields, and I want to create my own.

I like that you can mark a bookmark private/public, in Furl you can mark a bookmark read/unread…I want to make my own.

I’ve expressed my metadata issue in a past post, about more field types like CiteULike and perhaps facets.

I don’t want more tag fields, to me tags are topic (aboutness), all I want is to be able to sort my bookmarks in different ways, maybe you could call these facets, not sure:

1. Format - blog post, webpage, news item, journal article, search page, other (default)

This way I can sort all my bookmarks to just blog posts without having to use another tool like CrispyBlogPosts.

2. Content - review, how-to, analysis, etc…

Now I can see all my bookmarks that are just blog posts and are also reviews

3. Service - addon, bookmarklet, plugin, extension, desktop, tray, web

Now I can see all my bookmarks that are just review type of blog posts and are also desktop products

4. File - html, rss, opml, xml, etc…

Show me all bookmarks that are feeds
- maybe use 1. Format to sort which feeds are just blog feeds, news feeds, search feeds, etc…

Folders

Or can something like this be solved with folders…

Items that are blog posts can live in the blog post folder, this way I don’t have to sort, I just click on the folder.
And you could add folders eg. review folder + blog post folder + desktop folder.

Spurl, Clipmarks and Netvouz have both folders and tags.

In the case of Netvouz a bookmark can only appear in one folder, haven’t tested the others, but the idea is that other bookmarks with the same tag are chosen not to appear in a folder as it is not intended to be part of this folder collection.

Each folder doesn’t have a separate tag set, it is just that you can make different bucket type categories or topics, unfortunately del.icio.us tag bundles don’t have their own webpage.
But even if they did they are still not exclusive bundles, if I had a bundle called “KM Adoption”, the tags Pros and Cons may have bookmarks about the Pros and Cons of “mobile phones”…resulting in mixed content.

I guess these a bundles of tags not bundles of bookmarks.

So the idea is I can tag a post about mobile search with the tags “mobile”, “search” and I’d also like to be able to choose more than one folder to place it in. But in this case I may not care about the mobile world too much so I don’t have a folder collection about “mobiles”, but I do have a folder collection about “search”.

This post can be found at my tag “mobile” and my tag “search”.
This post can be found in my folder collection “Search Tools”.

When I see it in my Search Tools folder collection it may display the tags “mobile”, “search”…then I could say show me other bookmarks within this folder with the tag “mobile”, or show me other bookmarks within any folder with the tag “mobile”, or show me all bookmarks with the tag “mobile” from my whole account (whether it lives in a folder or not).

Channels

WTP is a webpage monitoring service, but why I bring it up is that you can have channels within the one service.

I wish del.icio.us had this, but I presume this would mean 2 different tag sets, like 2 channels within the same account.
This would be good for a related issue I have, I use 2 del.icio.us accounts for different type of content otherwise the one account gets too messy. Adding a bookmark is a hassle as I am always logging in to one account if I previously bookmarked on the other account.

Private Tags

I’d also like to have private tags, as I may tag an article about Folksonomies with these tags - Folksonomy, Taxonomy, Pros, Cons…these real granular analytical tags like Pros, Cons are hopeless for the community at large, it only means something to me.

Minus Tags

What I like about Simpy is that it has minus (-) tags:

Show me Folksonomy+Pros, but if any of these Pros and Folksonomy bookmarks have the tag Taxonomy then I don’t want to see them.

Let’s not talk about fielded search, Simpy is the champ…Diigo is also good.

Simpy also has Groups (also see Searchles, BlinkList, CiteULike, Connotea, Diigo, ma.gnolia), BlueDot has a personal friends group, which isn’t a formal group.

Related:
Folksonomies: Unique features
My del.icio.us issues plus blog tagging

CogMap - an organisational chart wiki, I like the idea of pre-formatted wiki pages, like Jotspot.

Yaplet - chat with others on the same website without having to be joined to a network, simply alter the URL…yet another Gabbly clone, also see Zpeech.

Acorn - share ideas, also see TagFacts, Bank of Ideas.

del.icio.us.salted.com - create a slideshow of live website images from your last 20 del.icio.us bookmarks…this would be a great idea for your OPML Reading List, a slide show of all the blogs your read.

SimulScribe - voicemail to text…GotVoice will turn voicemail into audio files, and Spinvox will convert voicemail into text. Also see here for similar tools.

MindMeister - collaborative mindmapping, also see bubbl.us.