Library clips

Lots of people tag their blog posts, and when visitors click on these blog post footer tags they get sent to Technorati Tags so they can discover other posts from the blogosphere with the same tags.

You can even alter your footer tags so when a visitor clicks a tag it launches to Technorati but limits to other posts with this tag from your blog only…you can even get a tag cloud widget called Blog Top Tag Widget.

We have mentioned using Technorati Tags to see similar tagged posts from the blogosphere or alternately similar tagged posts from one blog, well what about the middle ground, what about seeing similar tagged posts from a selection of 50 or 100 blogs.

At first I thought Technorati Favourites, but unlike the two previous ways, your Technorati Favourites page doesn’t have a tag cloud.
NOTE: it has tags to organise subscriptions into topics, but it doesn’t have an author tag cloud, ie. tags from the posts that your Favourite blog authors use in their posts.

So how can you make your own mini blogosphere tag cloud?

SuperGlu

Let’s look at SuprGlu (an old favourite)

- Import 50 feeds (darn, it lacks OPML import)…actually, I’m not sure about the limit of feeds
IMPORTANT: make sure your feed is included

- You get what looks like a blog that automatically posts content in a mixed stream from all these feed sources
- Each post title links to the native post, and each post also lists the source feed
- The tag cloud is created from the tags the feed source authors are using in their blog posts, meaning you can click a tag and see all posts from all sources that have that tag
- You get an RSS feed

Done, now each of your posts and the other feed sources posts are fed into your SuprGlu page, it’s like a mini Technorati Tags that streams posts like a blog, or you could say it looks like a multi-authored blog.

Lastly, in each of your blog posts you can enter tags that point to SuprGlu tags pages, now when a visitor is reading your blog post about “wikis” and they click the “wiki” tag to see similar posts about wikis, it will launch to the your SuprGlu “wiki” tag page.

Why do this instead of pointing your visitors to check out similar posts from the whole blogosphere…well there are just too many blogs, using a smaller feed set (mini blogpshere) cuts out a lot of crap blog posts, leaving you to see similar posts from quality blogs, blogs that you trust.
The downside is that there may be some quality blogs you have excluded from your feed set as you don’t know about them, so there is less serendipity factor, but at least it’s more filtered, where it’s bound to offer you more quality similar posts.

Maybe a similar service to SuprGlu cloud have more of a wiki feel, where people could register and submit quality blogs, this way your feed set grows to encompass more sources, but at least they are trusted quality sources…make your own communal blog tagosphere.

MySyndicaat

Another service you could use is MySyndicaat, this service is much more powerful than SuprGlu in the way of remixing feeds, but just the same it has a tag cloud.
Here is an example of a Web 2.0 news radar.

Here’s a fictional example of tags I would use for this blog post if it was about a search based web 2.0 company that has folded:

Tags (similar posts): search, web2.0, deadpool

MySyndicaat doesn’t seem to show the whole tag cloud as I see a lot of tags in these posts not featured in the tag cloud.

Examples

Now you have choices other than Technorati Tags, to be able to point from your blogs posts to similar tagged posts from other quality blogs.

If I was posting about something to do with the human condition, I could tag my posts pointing to Global Voices (click on the explore links at top of page).

If I was posting about social media or social computing, I could tag my posts pointing to the Social Media Collective.

If you know of anymore collectives on a topic, please let me know…the idea here is pointing to similar blogs posts that you know specialise in this topic…pointing to quality, not hit and miss like Technorati Tags.

More on MySyndicaat…

As I mentioned in my last post on MySyndicaat, another cool feature is tag rings, this way if someone tags something web2, you can make it appear as web 2.0 (eg. when web2 = web 2.0), otherwise you will have these similar tags (intending the same thing) messing up your tag cloud, so a bit of moderation will clean up this sort of thing happening: web2, web 2, web2.0, web-2,web-2.0, etc…

I also now notice a calendar, Google Reader Link blogs could do with this feature, and of course each radar has its own feed, but I don’t see an OPML Reading List, actually I don’t even see a source list…I’d like to view posts limited a source or a selection of sources like in Blogdigger Groups.

And for each post you can do all this good things like:
E-mail | PDF | Save | Blog this! | Related stories | Bookmark | Follow

Each news radar has different viewing options:
eg. Here is the Social Software radar as selected on a page where you can still acces the other topic radars.

OPTIONS
- Power Viewer -read it on its own page
- Mobile Viewer
- Mini Reader
- Mini Ticker
- Mini Scroll

Another nifty thing I mentioned in my last post was that for each radar (these are called feedbots), you can create a digest, ie. you can create a special digest radar that only includes posts you have manually clipped from your radars, I think you can even blog in content…kind of like Top 10 Sources.

One final thing as that on the sidebar I’d like to be able to click on a folder to see a mixed stream of posts from all the radars in the folder. In fact when you create your own radars you don’t get to organise them in folders like is shown on the homepage, this would be an awesome feature for users to showcase access to all their radars from the one portal page.