Library clips

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.