Library clips

Not long ago I posted about mashtracker, the memetracker for the mashable blog. This is another way to read mashable, you will see inlinks and related posts clustered instead of in a linear fashion…now you can visually see the buzz around all blog posts from the one blog.

They have just released the mashtracker top 25 blogs.
This is the most frequently appearing blogs from the post in the “Discussions” section.

This reminded me of a feed grazing hack from Adam Green from while back now, and I think the mashtracker top blogs could add the feed grazing concept to this page.

What this hack does is enable feed grazing from machine generated Reading Lists.
A usual Reading List is a bunch of feed subscriptions on a topic or from a users RSS Reader subscriptions, this list may sometimes change depending on the owner of this list deleted/adding feeds.

Whereas a pure Grazing List is not created by a user, but moreso by a machine, and the feeds in the Grazing List are always changing.
The same list tomorrow or later today will have a different set of feeds, so it’s kind of like feed shopping, every day you look at the same window for bargains, the mannequin’s will be wearing different clothes.

What Adam did was automatically scan the latest posts in Techmeme and grab the feeds of those posts, put them in a mini-RSS Reader so you can graze the contents of those feeds, if you like what you read, maybe you may commit to subscribing to it in your RSS Reader.
The last thing I need is more feeds, but I like the idea of discovering feeds in this fashion.

Maybe I can do this for my megite OPML, now that would be nice.

So the top blogs at mashtracker is doing this very thing, only it lacks the last step, reading the feed contents from within this page. At the moment it is a dynamic list of blog home pages, where as I want a dynamic list of feeds that I can read like an RSS Reader.

What about doing the same thing for a Technorati Search, see here.
Basically we are saying, can I see all the blog feeds from the blog posts in this search result in an on the fly RSS Reader so I can see their other posts.

More

Now wait for it, look what else the mashtracker top blogs could do, for every feed in the top 25 it could list the author, Technorati Tags, Rank and Inlinks…see how Adam extended his original hack.

Annotated Grazing Lists add so much more context to information, the data is just waiting to be pulled in to join the party.

Not long ago I posted about Blogtronix, and how it enables you to create a portal by re-syndicating feed content, a perfect example is Social Media Today.

Check out ScienceBlogs, I’m not sure of what service they are using to run this, but it is an amazing portal for re-syndicating Science Blogs.

Features
- on the sidebar of the home page they have a blog index, this is a link to see each blog within the portal.
- search all blogs
- “channels” is also on the sidebar, these channels give context to the blog index…so you can find a blog via the blog index or via the channel (topic folder).

Notice one of the channels is called “24 hours”, this allows you to see the latest posts from all blogs within a 24 hour time period, this type of feed could probably be created with Yahoo! Pipes.

- “more hot topics” are links to pre-done searches
- along the top is a bar that scrolls the latest posts
- in the middle is a kind of memetracker as it lists the latest posts around a hot topic, not sure how often this changes, or how they decide on the hot topic, maybe it’s based on the most frequent appearing word (word burst), or probably something more clever.
- the second half of the page has a selection of the latest posts from each channel

That’s the front page, if you want to read a blog or a channel just click on it.

Here’s an example of a blog.

Only feedback is that when you are on a blog you don’t know what channel it belongs to, so I have to click through all the channels to see which one a blog belongs in, once I have located the channel, then I can discover similar blogs.
Each blog has a drop down menu to jump to another blog, but as I mentioned there lacks a drop down menu to jump to a channel, where the default could be set to the channel the blog you are looking at belongs to.

I like that you can see the top 5 most emailed posts, but what’s this mean I don’t see an email this post link, wouldn’t they need this so they can register when it is clicked.

A similar version of the scrolling latest post from the portal is still along the top bar, even if you are viewing a single blog.

Here’s an example of a topic channel.

Again we still have the scrolling bar for the latest posts, we can still jump to other blogs, and we can also jump to another channel.
We also have the top 5 most emailed posts, most active posts (what does this mean?), and most searched posts…this applies to the portal as a whole.

My feedback is that it shows you the latest posts from all blogs in this channel, but where exactly is the list of all blogs in this channel.

Also where’s the feed, I have to instead click on the main feed page:
- subscribe to a channel or a blog, I’d like a selection box to pick and choose. There’s also a mother spliced feed of the whole lot and a filtered feed of the best posts from the network, not sure how they work this out…Original Signal have just introduced something similar based on visitor clicks.

More
From what I can see it seems this is not re-syndicated content, but rather in house blogs, as the posts don’t seem to point back to an original site…from my little surfing around I only noticed the Gene Expression blog had another version outside of ScienceBlogs.

So this may not be newsmastering after all but more a multi-blog collective like ZDNet blogs, and ITToolbox.