Library clips

Ok, here’s my idea or really just the application of an existing idea.

This post refers to OPML feed grazing and then SLE feeds.

If you have followed a few of my recent posts, you will know I’ve been going on about being able to feed graze your MyBlogLog widget by giving it an OPML, and this may happen soon as both MyBlogLog and Grazr are keen to get rolling, and I heard MyBlogLog are re-vamping anyway.

This post is the same thing, but applying OPML feed grazing to a Top 100 list of Australian Blogs.

First thing, a Top 100 list is not really going to change that much except for re-ranking, some feeds will drop in and out, but mostly it’s re-shuffling.

In knowing this OPML feed grazing isn’t really going to benefit that much as new feeds won’t be dropping in that often with this type of list compared to another list where feeds would be dropping in/out every hour (now that’s feed shopping).

NOTE: a Top 100 list based on a different criteria would be good for feed grazing, like Top 100 feeds based on inlinks in the last 24 hours with the tag “wiki”.

This is saying, out of the blogs in the blogosphere who tag their posts “wiki”, who is being linked to the most in the last 24 hours, and order them in a list of 100.

Top 100 Australian Blogs Index

Not long ago I noticed on the sidebar of Craig Harper’s Blog that he had a list of the Top 100 Aussie blogs based on Technorati rankings, called the Ultimate Aussie Blogroll.

Likewise Meg has a a list called the Top 100 Australian Blogs Index, and this is based on more complex method of ranking.

QUESTION 1
How do you know which blogs from Technorati are Aussie blogs?

Is it some sort of geo tag in the metadata?

TalkDigger picks up blog location, but it picks up my blog from Ireland and not Australia as my host is in Ireland.

Gnoos can limit a search to aussie blogs, how do they do this?

QUESTION 2
How then do you go about generating such a list?

QUESTION 3
How do you create an OPML URL for this list?

QUESTION 4
How do you create an SLE feed for this list?

OPML

So the idea is to generate an OPML URL for this list, that way I can subscribe to it in an RSS Reader like BlogBridge or bookmark it in Grazr.

Whenever I go to check out the OPML at BlogBridge or Grazr I can see what the current feeds are: tomorrow or a week from now there could be some different feeds in this list, which I could graze and consider subscribing to, great for discovery…feed shopping from your own house.

As I mentioned in this post there is also a way for BlogBridge to even tell you if there are feeds dropping in/out from the OPML by way of a notification pop-up. So you are notified even before you get stuck into your feed reading.

Hmmm…could you get this notification as an RSS feed?

SLE

Under the “Related” heading in this post I mentioned that perhaps an SLE feed would be the perfect application for a Top 100 List, after all SLE stands for Simple List Extensions.

So this is kind of like a wiki changes RSS feed, when ever there is a change on a page you are notified, only an SLE feed will do more than notifying, it will show you the current contents of the page in the new feed item.

In the context of a Top 100 list it’s not a human making changes to the list on the webpage, but the machine (the machine tracks how many people link to a feed and will action it in or out of the list)…so it’s based on the actions of people, but the machine does all the processing.

A list of items on a webpage may change for 2 reasons:
1. a feed drops out and a feed drops in
2. re-ordering of feeds in the this list

Now when ever any of the 2 actions happens above the SLE feed you are subscribe to will notify you of not a new item, but of the new status of the page…it’s almost like webpage monitoring, FeedWhip even has a feed.

eg. the top 5 movies for the week in a video shop based on number of borrowing, are at this webpage shown as a ranked list:

1. movie A
2. movie B
3. movie C
4. movie D
5. movie E

This current hour the list changes: C becomes the top borrowed movie, D drops out of the list and F comes in at number 3, A has dropped to number 4, and, B and E hold their positions.

The next time your RSS Reader polls this feed your SLE feed will go bold, you click on it and the new item will be:

1. movie C
2. movie B
3. movie F
4. movie A
5. movie E

An SLE feed is more than a new item, it’s a context feed, it’s more about “there was a change in this webpage, and here is what the web page looks like now”.

Coming to think of it an SLE is more like a webpage monitoring/detection service like FeedWhip.

More

This is when an outlining tool like Grazr would take it even further than a traditional RSS Reader.

In an RSS Reader an SLE feed may notifiy you of the current top 10 feeds based on todays inlinks, so you click on the new item and you see the current list, now I’m not sure if the content in the list are feeds or the blog homepages…but either way this is where your RSS Reader ends, you have to click to launch to a native site for more.

This is a paradox because in Grazr you are not notified of new content like a personal RSS Reader, it’s more a public RSS Reader, there isn’t a mark read/unread function.
But the difference is that when you click on the feed you click on the new item, and you will see a list of the top 10 feeds, then you could go further and click on a feed to graze/read it.

So…

What do you think, is an OPML URL and an SLE feed handy for a Top 100 blog list?

Related:
SLE feeds for Library OPAC’s