Library clips

This post is about formalising a blogosphere topic into more of a community, rather than just a pile of linear posts labelled with an ambiguous and non-contextual “tag”.

It’s not about tracking exact blog conversations or even know they exist, I don’t think we can do that yet, BlogPulse Conversation Tracker and megite do their job, but they don’t include all the elements involved.

So that’s conversations, and both these services could very well groups conversations into topics, much better than Technorati Tags.

Before we go on read here to catch up on blog communities, networks, conversations, discussions, clouds, and attention.

Technorati

The way Technorati Tags stands you have external blogs (blogosphere) and their tags, pinging Technorati enables it to organise the blogosphere into topic pages. It’s not useful as an way to follow conversations, it’s just a dumping ground for blog posts about the supposed same topic.

Then we have Technorati Blog Directory, where you can view topic pages according to a set of blogs, problem with this is these blogs don’t always blog about the same topic.

1. Maybe Technorati Blog Directory could be a filtered version of Technorati Tags, if you claim your blog as the topic “wiki”, then only those posts you tag “wiki” should be displayed. So your blog is a source in the “wiki” topic OPML, but only a selection of your content will appear in the latest posts (has this latest posts section disappeared??)

2. Or I want to see Technorati Tag content limited to blogs from a topic/s on the Technorati Blog Directory.

3. What about if you could limit Technorati Tags to your Technorati Favourite blog set

4. You can already search within your Technorati Favourites, so why not explore by tag…display a tag cloud from your favourite blogs.

Let’s look at the Technorati feature set:

- Blog search
- Live results (mini)
- Blog tag results (you can’t search within a tag/s)
- Blog directory (even view posts by a category)
- Blog favourites (a public RSS Reader, basically your own version of the blog directory)
- Watchlist (Similar to blog favourites in a way, but for search feeds)
- Blog profile and community, this is nearly a blog social network.
- WTF Blogging (tag posts and others can vote)…this is a blog network, only you can’t add friends and message so it’s not very social

It seems Technorati has it all, not only can you search blog content, even by topic; search for blogs by topic; track search feeds; collect, organise and read blogs by topic; have a profile and be part of a blog network; but you can also also blog content.

These last 3 parts are brought under the banner at your user space summary.

There it is: my blog, tag cloud, and my fans; blogs (people) I’m a fan of, and my Technorati blog (WTF)…also view content by tag.

Just looking at these 3 features, it’s attempting to be a blog network like MyBlogLog and blogcatalog, but also a blog network like CommonGate, Sponit, and Newsvine.

Both types of services require registration, with the former you post on your own blog, and with the latter you post on a blog provided by the service.

Favourites feedback

- You can’t view a tag cloud of your Favourites, and you can’t limit content from your favourite blogs by a Technorati tag/s
- You can’t comment on a favourite blog (whether it’s the blog profile page or the person page)
- You can’t message a favourite
- You can’t pimp up your blog page or user page with widgets

WTF feedback

- You can’t view content by user tags
- You can’t comment or chat on a post
- and the same as above, you can’t comment, message, or pimp up your user page

Compare content

Like Newsvine topics/tags, Technorati WTF has topics:

- WTF iPhone (also see external blogosphere content tag for iPhone)
- Newsvine iPhone (”the wire” is auto-tagged external news press content, and “the vine” is internal social blogging content)

Here we can see what the external press is saying about iPhone, we can see what both blog networks are saying about iPhone, and what the whole blogosphere is saying about iPhone.

There are lots and lots of blog networks on the web, not sure if there is a service that aggregates all tag content from these networks, like Technorati Tags does for blog platforms.

I suppose another aspect is what a memedigging community, like Digg, think about the tag iPhone; or a clipmarking community iPhone tag, like clipmarks; or a bookmarking community, like del.icio.us, or a memetracker like megite.

What about groups or community around a WTF topic?

I mentioned in my Newsvine post that they now offer groups, so what content benefit do we get from creating a semi-formal community around a topic. I say semi-formal because your posts can appear both in the group/s and the tag pages.

Here is the group Chocolcate Dreams, the topic is quite obvious.

For a starter you can see a member list, so the posts are only from a chosen quality based sample of sources from the whole Newsvine service.
There is also a moderator who may be the steward and look after the sustainability of the group:
- generate participation
- support (also technology)
- generate promotion
- moderate
- keep it active

All this is going to make a cleaner and cared for topic page than the general tag page on “chocolate“.
Also we can see more context, that is tags within the topic chocolate.
This type of community participation is easy to run as members are still posting from their own user space, so when they have nothing to say about chocolate, they still have a soapbox to talk about other stuff.

You will also notice that content is clipped from the general Newsvine service (what about external clipings?), so these groups are authoring content from select experts and choosing select posts from elsewhere, in attempt to create a quality topic based news page better than just a pile of posts that have a tag in common.

What do you think…

Could Technorati have a column on their Technorati Tag page for tagged posts from WTF?

Could Technorati WTF have group spaces where there are:

- select member WTF blogs
- clip posts from WTF general community about “chocolate”
- clip posts from Technorati Tags on “chocolate”
- clip posts from Technorati Search on “chocolate”
- clip posts from Technorati Blog Directory on “chocolate” (as mentioned before they don’t seem to display posts)

This would be an attempt, like Newsvine, for what’s the current news and thoughts about “chocolate” website. I think this is better than a Technorati Tag or Blog Directory or Search or WTF, why not take from all and get the best from all social input…there is so much content now, we really need filters and quality.

From the success of such a site they could really be developed into community portals like Zimbio wikizines, even webjam, by introducing other communication formats, such as forums, FAQ, Q&A, bookmarks, etc…also see GROU.PS, Nexo, clearspace x, etc…

This post was really about filtering Technorati to see a more quality based topic network.

Contactify - a form so your blog visitors can email you without having to know your email.
Not too bad, but something I’ve wanted for ages is to enable this for blog posts, where you can send an email of that blog post to a friend. So far I have seen FeedBlitz-Email to a Friend, and ShareThis (eg doubles up as a bookmark submitter)…not to be confused with ShareThis Wordpress plugin (eg).
Wyaworks and Wufoo are form creators if you want a DYI approach…and the file based approach.
When will I see a button for my blog posts so people can print a print-friendly version of your blog post. [via TC]

JS-kit - ratings, polls, and comments feature for your blog, also see more of this stuff here. Other comments are Instacomment and ZoopIn. Other ratings are star it, Spotback Rate Everything, bumpbox, authorati, and Newsgator ratings.

Turtilla - a new RSS remixer, see ‘em all.

Voxlite - another video email, also see Gabmail, EyeJot, Turboflix

Twitterbox - beon desktop widget to interact with Twitter, also use Beon to make RSS widgets. You’ll find similar desktop Twitter widgets here.