Library clips

Some RSS extensions I have come across are SLE and SSE, but I have seen very limited use.

Here are my posts to date:
SLE : List feeds
SLE feeds for Library OPAC’s
SSE: bi-directional RSS feeds
SSE possibilities

This post is about an SSE based site called Skinny Farm, I mentioned on another post that it is the project of Matt from everybuddy.
NOTE: I first played around with SkinnyFarm over a year ago, but never got round to posting about it.

Just briefly SkinnyFarm seems more like communal feeds than bi-directional feeds, but then again maybe I don’t understand it fully. Another thing, when you publish at SkinnyFarm, with the use of tags you are publishing the same content at multiple places.

The popular scenario of SSE is where changes in calendar A will create changes in calendar B; besides having their own RSS feed, they both share an SSE feed.

So in SkinnyFarm you could re-syndicate a SkinnyFarm feed in a blog, and multiple people could post to this feed from the SkinnyFarm admin area of that feed, and you could also post to the blog from the actual blog’s admin area.
The blogs RSS feed would include content from the SLE feed published posts as well, but if you subscribed to the SLE feed in an RSS Reader, you would only see the SLE published posts and not posts made at the actual blog.
To me this isn’t quite bi-directional, it is content published in one place and appearing in many, as long as the other places have a way to subscribe to the SLE feed.
The calendar example seems more like a bi-directional example, as publishing in one calendar will reflect in the other and vice versa, ie. it works 2 ways.

Here’s the skinny…

When you get to the SkinnyFarm page you can browse a tag cloud of feeds, click on a tag, and see a list of feeds, then click on a feed.

Now you can decide to post to this feed and/or subscribe to this feed.

So what we have here are communal feeds, anyone can post to the same feed.

A feed in SkinnyFarm doesn’t have a public HTML page, if you like you could make one by entering it on a service like SuprGlu, ie. basically giving your feed a blog home page.

NOTE: the feed page does have a heading on the bottom called “Recent Posts”, so this very well could be the public blog-type page for this blog

We have seen these feeds before, they are called edge feeds, other edge feed services are: Sabifoo, ShortText, publi.sh, mynotify, glue, feedXS, and linkRSS.

The only difference here is that SkinnyFarm edge feeds are communal, anyone can post to them.

The great thing about this is that you don’t have to go to SkinnyFarm to post to an edge feed, I’ll explain…

Besides posting to an edge feed, we also want to subscribe to the same edge feed to see what other people may be posting in the same feed (remember it’s a communal feed).

Here is what a SkinnyFarm feed looks like in an RSS Reader…2rss is perfect as a disposable feed reader/grazer.

This is not a very good example, but you can see that by publishing to a communal feed it can act as a flat level discussion thread, kind of like a comments thread in a blog.

The part I don’t get is that when you look at the feed in your RSS Reader, after each item/post it says “Reply to or update this post”.

When you click on this all you are doing is creating a new post in this feed, which may be a reply type post or just a new post, but I don’t see how you update a post, because that would mean to me you would be re-editing a post, like a wiki type blog (bliki).

Tags

Now it gets even more juicy, when you post in a feed you also tag your post, what this means is that the post will appear in multiple places.
It will appear in the feed, and it will appear in the tag/s feed.

For example a post will appear in the feed:
http://skinnyfarm.com/rss/enhanced/feed/Web2.0

This feed doesn’t have a public page so you will have to view it in an RSS Reader:
http://www.2rss.com/news/?rss_url=&rss=http%3A%2F%2Fskinnyfarm.com%2Frss%2Fenhanced%2Ffeed%2FWeb2.0

Tagging this post web2.0, blog, rss, sse…means this post will also appear in these tag feeds;
http://skinnyfarm.com/rss/tag/web2.0
http://skinnyfarm.com/rss/tag/blog
http://skinnyfarm.com/rss/tag/rss
http://skinnyfarm.com/rss/tag/sse

Unlike the feed, these tags have a HTML public page:
http://skinnyfarm.com/tag/web2.0
http://skinnyfarm.com/tag/blog
http://skinnyfarm.com/tag/rss
http://skinnyfarm.com/tag/sse

And lastly the post will have a permalink.

So the post I published appeared in 6 places: the feed, 4 tags, it’s own permalink.

Distributed conversations

Basically a post isn’t rigid, it can belong anywhere, I could post in a feed and give it a few tags, and someone can post a reply in the same feed but give it different tags, so you can have a linear conversation in the feed, but the conversation would be disconnected if replies chose different tags,
ie. if you were looking at a post at a tag page, how would you know which post it is having a conversation with, if that post isn’t in the same tag page. As long as all posts have a link to the feed page they belong to you will see both posts in the same linear page.

This reminds me of tag forums, or roving blog networks like Commongate, only with SkinnyFarm the one post can appear in multiple places, and you don’t have a user space of all your posts.
Chat blogging may fit into this scenario.

I see it like this….

You post in a feed, and choose various tags so this post appears in all these other places, it’s kind of like pushing your posts into Technorati Tags. With SkinnyFarm the feed you post in and the tags you choose are all in the same system, whereas usually you have your blog, and you have Technorati Tags.

Actually, my blog categories have feeds, so I don’t see publishing in SkinnyFarm any different to publishing in a blog…content appears in the main feed and category feeds.

But things change when in SkinnyFarm as there isn’t just one feed (blog), there are lots of feeds and they are all sharing the same category feeds…again this is what Technorati Tags is, a collective category/tag space.

So then SkinnyFarm may not be much different to a generic blog network like Sponit, feedXS, etc…as all the blogs (feeds) are in the same network and you can see posts from all blogs (feeds) filtered by category/tag.
Well, the main difference is that the user spaces are feeds and they are communal.

More

You would of noticed that at a SkinnyFarm feed you will see “Add to my personal feed”, all this means is that instead of subscribing to heaps of SkinnyFarm feeds, you can just subscribe to your Personal feed, as long as you add each feed to your personal feed…it’s like a dynamic spliced feed.

And lastly in the settings there is an option to add posts from your blog to a SkinnyFarm feed, kind of like re-syndicating del.icio.us links to your blog feed.

And it seems you can do the reverse, whenever you post anywhere in SkinnyFarm it will appear in a Blogger blog.

And more

So you may not have to re-syndicate a SkinnyFarm feed into SuprGlu as you can just use the Blogger feature.
All your SkinnyFarm friends could post to the same Blogger blog…hmmm interesting.

The other day I posted a wish that it would be great if the MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget had an OPML URL, we could then create a Grazr for it, and bookmark that Grazr page for daily use.

If we were even more clever we could make the widget itself have Grazing capabilities, the comments left on my post say they are working on an API, so we will wait and see the flood of tools and hacks.

Matt from everybuddy who seems to understand my concepts lead me to another simple application:
“Why do you even need to go to your own site? Why not a dynamic feed in your reader?”

I’m not sure what Matt means by dynamic RSS, but if the MyBlogLog widget had an OPML URL, then people who use BlogBridge could subscribe to the OPML of their widget. When they click on that OPML every hour, there will be different feeds to read, now this is what I call grazing, and grazing at headquarters, ie. your RSS Reader. It’s a pity other RSS Readers haven’t followed the advanced features of BlogBridge.

One thing though, I remember Pito from BlogBridge saying that if a feed is deleted (drops out) or is added (drops in) from the OPML you are subscribed to, then BlogBridge will notify you whether you want to accept/reject changes.
This is OK for an OPML Reading List, as the feeds in these types of lists don’t change that much, but an OPML Grazing List has feeds dropping in and out perpetually…reason being is that it is not a human adding/deleting feeds, but as a result of a machine based activity. For instance in a MyBlogLog Grazing List the feeds would be dropping in/out according to site visits to your blog.
So for BlogBridge to handle OPML Grazing Lists you would need to be able to turn off that notification mechanism asking you whether you want to accept/reject a new feed in the OPML you are subscribed to, otherwise this notification alert would be popping up constantly (well, if your blog has little site visits from the MyBlogLog community then there will be little activity).

Then Matt says:
“…why not a dynamic feed based upon conversations you are in as well? Every RSS item is open and two-way, to whatever extent you wish. Comments are dead.”

Maybe he is refering to the bio-directional possibilities of SSE feeds.

I haven’t come across a graspable application of SSE feeds, I played with SkinnyFarm a while back, but forget the details…what do you know, it’s Matt’s creation.

I’m not sure if SLE feeds would come into this equation, this would mean your MyBlogLog widget would have an SLE feed, subscribing to this feed would just show you the latest list of people who have visited your blog.
Whenever the SLE feed would poll your widget, the new item in the SLE feed would show a list of the recent readers, just like the widget does, if you click on one it would launch to their MyBlogLog page, again just as the widget does.

But what about an SLE feed in a Grazr widget, when you click on the feed it will display the current list of recent readers, and if you click on one of these people, I hope it would be a folder which would reveal some nodes about their MyBlogLog profile, and one of these nodes would be their blog feed, which you could click on and graze.

BONUS:
Pito has enabled people to upload an OPML file from thier PC onto BlogBridge, when you make changes to the OPML file on your PC, it will dynamically reflect on BlogBridge. Wow, this usually only happens with an OPML URL, but since BlogBridge is a desktop app and the OPML file is on the same desktop (PC), then BLogBridge is able to communicate with this file (like its only little web).

theagoo is the latest meta-bookmark search engine, it searches across 10 social bookmark sites…basically it searches the human indexed web.
The results don’t tell you which hits came from which service and which tags were used, I’d like to keep discovering from the search results.
I’d also like to search for a tag, then within a tag, Technorati Tags doesn’t do the second bit, but then again Technorati Tag is more focused on the blog category tag part of the tagosphere.

So let’s see how many of these type of services have bitten the dust:

- Wink (used to be a meta-search bookmark engine as well as a social bookmark service, but now it is a people search engine)
- gutentag
- Gataga
- Tagosphere
- Tagground

Who’s still around:
- TagJag
- Tagbert
- TagCentral
- rel8tr
- keotag
- tagfetch
- Tagland
- TagBulb

NOTE: not all these are focused just on social website bookmarks, some include blog tags, photo’s, video’s, basically the whole tagosphere.

Related:
Socialmeter : ego bookmarks
Social bookmarks vs. free text search
Search trends: relevancy, discovery, findability
Tagging alone is not a panacea for retrieval!
Folksonomy: search vs. browse
2006 Predicition: bookmark engine

[ADDED 21/05/07 : 50 matches]

[ADDED 5/06/07: tagsahoy limits search to just your profiles]