Science Blogs newsmastering portal
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.
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ScienceBlogs is not a blog re-syndication site. Those blogs only exist there, and have been recruited by invitation. The site is run on Moveable Type.
Comment by Martin R — March 30, 2007 @ 7:54 am