Library clips

A little while ago I announced that Grazr now hosts OPML URL’s, basically you upload an OPML file and it will turn it into an OPML URL.
Changes in the original won’t reflect, so from time to time you can just reload the original OPML file.

A similar feature to adding a file was adding from the web, essentially this is the same thing, but all you are doing is uploading an OPML URL (instead of an OPML file), and hosting it as a Grazr OPML URL. Similar to adding a file, you need to reload the URL so changes are reflected.

It would also let you bookmark OPML’s that already have a URL, any changes in the original would reflect in your bookmarked version.

Anyway, these 3 options were a bit too much:
- add an OPML file to create a Grazr OPML URL
- add an OPML URL to create a Grazr OPML URL
- bookmark an OPML URL

Grazr have agreed with their users and have cleaned things up a bit.

The have gone back to basics with 2 options:
- Add Feed
- Add Reading List

The terms RSS and OPML may seem too techie…Feed and Reading List seem more friendly.

Add Feed

Basically add a RSS URL and create a Grazr page for it, also create a widget and easy add it to a service like an RSS Reader or Start Page.

Add Reading List

A choice to upload an OPML file, or OPML URL (with an option to copy to Grazr)

Upload an OPML file - this will create a hosted Grazr OPML URL (Reading List)

Enter an OPML URL - this will bookmark the OPML (changes to the original will be reflected)

But, if you also select the option “Copy to Grazr”, you are no longer bookmarking the OPML URL, you are now cloning it and making your own OPML URL version (changes to the original will not be reflected).

It is made clear that if you check the “Copy to Grazr” box, then you are no longer simply bookmarking the URL, instead you are making your own version, and changes to the original will not reflect (just like when you Upload an OPML file)

But what isn’t said is, if you do not check the box, then you are simply just bookmarking the URL, and changes to the original will reflect.

Editing

If you do check the “Copy to Grazr” box (when entering an OPML URL), this creates your own hosted OPML URL (the original OPML URL you uploaded is now out of the picture).

What you can do next is a great step forward, you can now edit your hosted OPML…delete feeds, add some more feeds, even delete all the feeds and put fresh ones in, it’s your own OPML now and you have full control of its contents. You can do this by clicking on the “Edit Source” link.

NOTE: When you upload an OPML file, you don’t need to check any boxes, you will be able to later “Edit Source” just the same.

In a nutshell you can now edit an existing OPML…but you are not quite creating an OPML from scratch, there isn’t a “create an OPML” button as yet, you have to upload an OPML first, in order to edit it.

This is a basic techie type editor, I just know they have will have something like OPML Manager soon, ie. more of a GUI editor.

Don’t forget at the bottom of your “My Files” page is your root OPML, this is a kind of mother OPML that includes all the Feeds and Reading Lists you have added.
When you click on your root OPML, called File List (OPML), it’s just like any other Grazr page, you can create a widget, etc…
You can even add your root OPML to your “My Files” section, creating a new OPML, and edit away…it almost sounds like it’s feeding back on itself, but it isn’t.

Grazr is also social, you can view a profile, click on an item, and “Add to My Files”…don’t think you can disable people from adding one of your files, who would want to anyway.

Don’t forget your Grazr bookmarklets

Other OPML helpers.

Also check out the Grazr tools page for Grazr hacks and other RSS and OPML tools.

How you can be more productive with RSS Readers, not by any manual effort, but by the RSS Reader being more smarter.

Personalisation

An obvious method is personalisation, readers like Attensa are the typical example, and the Engagd application of APML attention data now enables you to personalise feeds, even if your RSS Reader doesn’t have this feature.

This is more productive as the reader learns what you like and will deliver that news to you first, this means if you don’t have time to read everything, at least you read the stuff that’s important to you personally.

Clustering/Memetracker (social)

Another is clustering, this usually means that for any given post, other posts in your RSS Reader will be extracted to sit next to it, or under it as one digest of new posts about the same thing.

It’s such a handy feature if you’ve been on holidays or for breaking news…open up your RSS Reader to find a post on eg. Facebook being banned in the workplace, all other posts in your RSS Reader about the same thing will be listed next to this post, this saves you scanning for other new posts on the same thing.

New posts in your RSS Reader that are clustered would be ranked on top of the pile in your river of news (or you could still have date sorted order), as it’s assumed a story with many similar posts clustered is popular, since everyone is talking about it, and you would most likely want to read this first when you open your RSS Reader.

This is 2 fold for productivity: posts are clustered and also ranked higher in your RSS Reader.

Some clustering readers will also cluster stories you have already read in the past, I like this option, as sometimes you take a week to write a post, and it’s handy to go back to your RSS Reader and get a cluster around a story whether you have read the clustering posts or not.

Another option would be to additionally get clustering stories from feeds you don’t subscribe to, just for a more rounded picture.
I suppose you can kind of achieve this by clicking Technorati Links or Sphere related stories on the post footer or feed post flare.

I’ve written about this all before and how Google Reader could adopt clustering know-how from it’s sister news site.

Maybe a memetracker like megite could offer a 3rd party clustering button for Google Reader, for any given post in Google Reader you could click the cluster button to get other similar stories from the blogosphere, via the discovery engine.

Megite could even go further to have an interface for one blog, eg. mashtracker…memetrackers are more sophisticated than something like Technorati links, I think a given post has to be considerably popular for the memetracker to work well.

Regardless, this type of 3rd party feature is not the same as what I mentioned at the start of this post, that is, a clustering feature to sort your new posts (and maybe old posts) by popularity and cluster all new posts (and maybe old posts) around one post.

In this respect you can read all new posts about breaking news in one digest, you no longer have to trawl through your RSS Reader to find posts about the same thing.

RSS Reader memetrackers so far are: megite, tailrank, myfeedz, wizag, feeds 2.0, feedable, feedeye…

The next move for clustering would be memetracker widgets, where each cluster would be a widget, so you could embed it into a blog post.

Social Network

Some RSS Readers are part of a social network, in these instances you can add friends, look at their profiles, share links with each other, some of these are Spokeo, FeedEachOther, and others…also see mugshot groups.

Page clustering

BlogRovr is in a class of its own, give it some feeds and then any page you visit will let you know if any posts from your feedset have linked to this page.
This can make up for lack of clustering in your RSS Reader in relation to a new product. Just say you find out about the latest product called Pulse.Plaxo. Instead of going through your RSS Reader, let it come to you, just go to the new website (Pulse.Plaxo), and all new posts, from your RSS Reader, that link to this webpage will be listed for you in a digest.

This is a bit harder for a topic like “Facebook banned in the workplace” as all the posts in your RSS Reader about this topic may not point to the same exact page, so you won’t get it in one digest, perhaps BlogRovr could incorporate some memetracking elements, rather than just linking.

Their latest release is juiced up a little more with Google Reader plugin and recommendations. The Google Reader plugin becomes a substitute for inhouse clustering, only thing is do you click on the clustered post on the BlogRovr slider, or do you go look for that post in your RSS Reader.

Otherwise just rely on search, since Google Reader doesn’t have search, I made a custom search engine, you can even get a script to put a box into Google Reader itself.
NOTE: You need to refresh your OPML by reloading it from time to time, as Google Reader doesn’t have a unique OPML URL, arghh!

NEW: BlogRovr now can search in your OPML.

Filtering

Personal - already mentioned Engagd

Social - aideRSS generates filtered feed versions for a given feed based on social activity (popularity)

Manual - lots of remixing tools

Topic

MyFeedz allows you to add feeds, then choose some tags, and content will be delivered by tag, also has an option to let the system create tags for you…other features are personalisation and clustering.

WizAg allows you to add feeds and then create tags (concept topics) to read content, it also has clustering.

ZoomCloud and PersonalBee (acquired by Technorati) create auto tags, where you can read content by tag.

Author tags - both SuprGlu and MySyndicaat differ as you can enter a feed set, and then read content by tags based on the tags authors applied to their blog posts.

Please suggest other ways RSS Readers can be more productive?

NOTE: this post is not about people being productive with methods and workarounds, but moreso the RSS Reader having smarter features.

[ADDED 07/09/07: SharpReader threads are meme enough for me]

RSS remixing resources are a plenty (filtering by tag, keyword, etc)…and splicing many feeds into a new feed, and even a HTML page to see your results.

AideRSS is RSS filtering with a difference, for any given feed you enter, it will generate various filtered feeds, not based on the person manually filtering in/out a keyword, but on the social activity around the feed.

Basically enter a feed and it offers a selection of ways to view this feed: All Posts, Good Posts, Great Posts, Best Posts, Top 20.

This is just the start, each of these filtered views has a feed, you can choose to add any to your RSS Reader, or add one to the My Feeds section.
The My Feeds section is a river of news of all your filtered feeds, and it outputs a spliced feed that you can subscribe to in your RSS Reader…the FAQ illustrates this effectively.

The automatic filters are based on PostRank which determines the social activity of posts within a feed, by determining it’s number of comments, times it has been bookmarked, rated, linked to, etc…R/WW tells us PostRank is not absolute, it’s only relative to other posts in the same feed:

“It’s important to note that because PostRank is normalized for each blog, a PR8 post on Slashdot is vastly different than a PR8 post on Read/WriteWeb.”

Mashable suggests PostRank could be a feature or plugin to your RSS Reader…more from Mashable:

“…helps you to prioritize news feeds based on the amount of social activity around them. Using an algorithm called PostRank, which tracks the number of comments, Digg votes, del.icio.us bookmarks and more, it will process any feed you enter and spit out feeds of All Posts, Good Posts, Great Posts, Best Posts and the Top 20. The ranking is relative, not absolute: it doesn’t matter that your latest post has less activity than Engadget’s, but rather that your latest post has more activity compared to your previous posts.”

Rather than subscribe to a filtered feed, I would like at my whim, the choice to read one of my feeds as filtered…today you may choose to read “all posts” by a particular feed, whereas if you are away for a couple of days you may decide to just read the “great posts” and ignore the rest.
eg. today I will read all posts from mashable, if I have been on holidays for a week, I may open my RSS Reader and decide to just read “great posts” from mashable…this way you have choice based on your situation.

I noticed mashable also mentions this:

“Make it a portable standard of sorts, rank the posts and let me decide how much I want to read: on busy days, perhaps just the top posts; on days with more free time, all of them. Further down the line, I think we’ll also see increased personalization: rather than showing me the stuff that the world likes best, show me what my friends and similar people liked.”

Memetrackers and memetracker RSS readers can identify socially popular posts and place them on the top of your pile as well as the clustered posts around them, see feedeye and feedable.
In this way instead of subscribing to a filtered feed, the popular posts are automatically ranked in your RSS Reader to the top of the pile.

I kind of find Engagd similar as you can make different variations (filtered versions) of a feed, the unique bit is that it’s not based on how popular it is socially, but how popular it is personally.

How it works

- Enter a feed or OPML

- You get various filtered views with %…eg. your blog may currently have 12% Great posts

- Each filtered view has a feed, subscribe to it in your RSS Reader or add it to your My Feeds section

- You can sort a view by PostRank, date, etc…you can see conversation activity for each post, and a summary if you click on more.

- The header has general stats eg. 170 posts per month • 512 posts since Jun 27, 07 • Last update: 36 minutes ago…and also a blog trends sparkline

- My Feeds section has 3 views: Saved feeds (where you can change the filters and export an OPML file), Top Stories (river of news of all your filtered feeds), and Dashboard (both views in one screen)

- Grab a spliced feed of your river of news or a top stories widget, I use Spotplex for now (this is moreso based on clicks, than conversation)

- Each feed also has a profile page where you can get a summary of all the filtered feeds and a widget (just click on sharing & widgets on a feed page)

Will I use it?

Not sure, I like the idea of entering my Top 10 feeds and not filtering, but sorting the content by PostRank, then subscribing to this one feed.

As mentioned before I’d like this as a feature in my RSS Reader, I think if I didn’t open my RSS Reader for a month, for each feed I would consider just looking at Top 20 posts, or Top 20 posts as a river of news for my whole RSS Reader.
If I’m still hungry for more, I could do the same thing again, but as a Great Posts view (in this instance the posts I marked as read from the Top 20 view would not appear).

These options make your RSS Reader more versatile where you can tailor productivity to the situation you are in
eg. I’ve just come back from holidays and I’ve got a big work load, I don’t have much time to read feeds, so just gimme the Top 20 posts of each feed, and I will feel I’m in the know without having to waste too much time.

It’s also handy if you want to try before you buy, that is, run a new feed through aideRSS to filter posts in different ways, this may help you decide if you want to subscribe (which is a commitment these days).

Filtering by popularity is always hard for the individual eg. mashable posts a lot, and I get a lot of my content from this blog, but I have to scan the many daily posts where I may find a couple of gems. If I sorted this by PostRank, the posts I like from their many daily posts are not necessarily going to be the socially popular posts. Filtering would be even worse as all I would see are the popular posts, this is why Engagd is a very “engaging” alternative, as it’s personalised.

I like the idea of using it for my blog feed to see the social activity, if I don’t use it for my feed reading, at least I will use it as a blogging tool.

The idea of aideRSS would be handy for a blog home page, I’d love to be able to filter a new blog by Top 20 posts, Great Posts, Good Posts, etc…

Tops stories from my blog (based on social activity)

Filtered feed versions of my blog

Top stories from my blog via SpotPlex (based on clicks in the last 7 days)

Top stories from my blog via SpotPlex (based on total clicks)

reQall - phone up and record audio snippets, search and browse in your web archive (as it converted to text), and RSS output…a similar service is Jott. Check out some similar sites at ResourceShelf (I’ve posted on most of these but it’s nice to have them on one list)

SlideAware - publish your slides on the web and also deliver them remotely like you can with web conferencing services, others can leave notes. Other slide sites are Preezo, Empressr, Thumbstacks, Slideshare, Slideburner, Zoho Show, Zentation
BTW, SlideShare now has audio to accompany slides (called Slidecasts)…Zentation also has video. [via DI]

Snimmer - a multi-IM web service like meebo, but in a social network kind of way…imagine if meebo gave you a public profile space, and other meebo user could chat with you. See VelvetPuffin and Hiitch for IM social networks (these are desktop apps).

Spotback cross recommendation widget - this is a post rating social network, but you don’t have to be registered to rate if you don’t want, other benefits of this widget are you can email the post, and see related posts from your blog and the blogosphere…also rate from within your RSS Reader.
Spotback engine recommends based on collaborative filtering, meaning that it uses (mostly) user ratings in order to determine what would be interesting for your readers. Therefore, the articles you write have to be rated in order to get related stories.
See it in action on one of my posts, under the comments box. Similar tools are WizAg and Sphere.

PinDax - create your own group public message board, or create one for your blog…lots of others lists in this post, these have live chat as well. PinDax differs as it’s not really linear messages, but more of a pin board or sticky note board.

profilebuilder - an identity page as well as a lifestream. There are sections like: About (interests), Resume (create using a WYSISYG), Photos (upload an album), Links (enter some links), Blogs (this is better, you can enter a feed), Contact List.
Until I got to the Channels feature, I thought this was just an identity page, but Channels allows you to create your own sections…all that’s left is output by RSS or APML.
The problem here is I can’t view my lifestream in one mixed stream, or at least on one categorised page like Ziki and Blueswarm.
So is it profilebuilder or profil.es?

Tangler Intergrated Discussion Forum - Tangler is a topic discussion service with real-time text chat (like Meebo Rooms), and regular messages…see Chinswing for audio byte discussions, what about VOIP topic rooms, kind of like YackPack with topic rooms.
Anyway Tangler givers you a user space, so you can be added as a friend and chat to other Tangler users, so it’s kind of a social chat network.
Now Tangler is on the move, you can add any Tangler topic channel to your blog, the discussion you see here could be happening on the Tangler site, or someone could be adding messages via your widget, whilst someone else is on another blog with the same widget discussing back.
Better still create a topic that is a discussion forum for your blog, not sure what sets it apart from Meebo rooms.
Not only do the widgets show discussions, but they also enable them…this reminds me of Geesee in a way.

Operator11 net jockey - this live streaming service as it all, not only do you have your own internet live TV channel, you can also get a live widget for your blog, just like blogTV (this link lists similar streaming services). Another thing is to be able to insert other media into your live show, like cutting to a video clip…while this is all going own guests are able to text chat, and after the show is over, it’s not really over…people can comment, rate, etc.
But what really takes the cake is that a netjockey can have guests that they can cut to, these guests take are in control in addressing the camera, or even sharing some media.
It’s kind of like web conferencing to the extreme, but what’s important is that this now can do what mainstream TV or news does, that is an anchor person being able to cut to their interviewee or field correspondent…but it’s more social as the interviewee can take control, and viewers can interact, and the show is available afterwards, even take it away as a widget.
Robin Good has more on his grassroots experiment using this new newscasting media. [via R/WW]

Groops - create your own community, similar to GROU.PS and Ning…Groops is a network of lots of Groups, a user has their own space and they can belong to many groups. When a user publishes a post it has to belong to a group, their user space will show all their posts they have made to all groups, I don’t think you can filter this by group. Each group has members, events, messages, etc…you can find groups and content by search, location, tags, etc…

I guess this is a network of groups, but it’s not really individual centric, unlike clearspace which is more of a closed enterprise tool (where you create several groups/communities on your server), you can have your own blog space and choose to send those posts to a group, only if you want to. In this respect it’s a social network and community site at the same time, ie. you can be part of the network without having to be a member of a group…not sure how Aroundme compares to clearspace. [via m]

Hipcast - record audio online, by phone (dialing a number), upload file…record video online, upload file (even record on your video phone and use email upload)…create podcasts…post audio, video, podcasts to your blog.

BONUS LINK
Wetpaint wiki network now has private wikis…Wetpaint wiki are just as much a group sharing communal website as much as it is a wiki.