Library clips

I posted about Blogtronix when it was a blog network, well now they have introduced other modules, catapulting it into an enterprise social network.

I first heard this from Jerry Bowles who is a person to follow if you are into Enterprise 2.0, he has his finger in many pies ie. Fast Forward Blog, Enterprise Irregulars, Social Media Today…

Their blog post has some screenshots of what’s on offer: blogs, wiki, social network, bookmarks, documents and more, all under the one banner.

Apparently this is what companies want, all modules from the one vendor…here’s an example.

For more on enterprise social networks, check out the comprehensive post on TechCrunch.

ADDED 08/09/07:

More on Blogtronix:
- here is a user…under the Groups link on the sidebar are 3 groups: Blogtronix, Corporate Blogging, and Support.
- so a users page is a river of news of posts made to all groups, you can filter to just one group by clicking on a group link.

eg.
- a post on the users blog, when clicked on the Support Group
- here’s the same post from the main user page in the July06 archives (scroll down to end)
- here’s the same post at the actual Support group page

So this post has 2 unique permalinks, one at the group page, and one at the users page

One issue, when I’m at the Support Group I can’t limit posts by just one user, if I click on the user link that sits next to a post it takes me to their user page, instead of their user page filtered to that group.

A user page lists connections/friends, I can’t see Facebook social network type features, like private messages, comment wall, etc…

You can keep track of friends updates with an inhouse RSS Reader (internal and external feeds), but you can subscribe to anyone here, they don’t have to be the same people as your friends/connections.

I can find a wiki and documents, but I can’t see an example of forums, Q&A, expert locator, bookmarks.

Here is a portal powered by Blogtronix called RedHerring…look at all the RSS choice.

The front page displays posts from all author’s by some selected tags, here is the Internet tag.

Here is a post from the Internet tag, you can choose another tag from the end of this post, like Social Network.

Here is an authors blog, we can see the same post above, but at the author’s site, this means each post has to unique permalinks.
If we choose a tag at the end of this post, it will again show us posts by all author’s with this tag, I thought that since we are on the author’s blog, we could see posts in a tag limited to just the author’s posts…you can do this from the tag cloud on the sidebar.
The weird thing is that when you click to see the whole tag cloud, these tags are no longer limited to the authors blog.

The front page is like a slice of the group blog page, this group blog page is like the backbone.

Here is an authors RSS Reader and their profile.

I see the profile has hyperlinks for interests, if this was aggregated into a group tag cloud, we would have an expert locator.

Only thing I don’t see are bookmarks, adding friends, messages and comments wall: bookmarks could be links blogs, adding friends and messages could help the authors communicate, as with comments wall (visitors could also use the comment wall).

Lots of posts about CollectiveX Groupsites, but I don’t see how this is different to Google Groups, what am I missing here…you have a profile page and you can join many groups, I guess it’s a little more networked than Google Groups, and looks better.

Google Groups has discussion forum, files and pages (create webpages for the group)…GROU.PS is similar.

CollectiveX has forums, files, media and a calendar (also batch messages blasts)…I do like the front page of a group, split up into events, discussions, headlines and recent group activity (kind of like the Facebook news Feed)…and you can get a feed for each of the 4 sections.

NOTE: Headlines are just another discussion forum.

So you can view profiles and send a message, but that’s it, you don’t get your own your own blog, you can’t add friends (well if you are in a group why would you want to add friends…but what if that group has 500 people?)

When you join a Ning group (eg. Mowser) you get a user space, you can message people, add friends, and you get a blog, and you can also post to the group forum. So your user space, among other things has your latest posts, and your latest forum posts and replies…not sure if it has my latest comments on other users blog posts.

I think Facebook is still ahead here as you have your own space in a social network, where you have your own media and blog, you can add friends and all that stuff. But then you can also join a group and have all the benefits that Collective X offers.

Only thing about Facebook is that you can’t view posts you make in groups in your own user space, and the other thing is you can’t send one of your personal blog posts to appear at the group page as well.

I mentioned all this in my post on Clearspace.

Another thing I also mentioned in my Clearspace post is that groups are limiting, we need our own soapbox as well, what if I want to collaborate with a few users across different CollectiveX groups, on-the-fly collaboration.

Here is the CollectiveX Champions group…I guess it’s more of a Community of Practice, with a few networking features.

While all the talk is about web-based RSS Readers, especially Google Reader, Jack Vinson has returned to using the SharpReader desktop client to keep up with the lastest, why, because it bundles conversations with a threading feature…Jack has spoken highly of this feature before (which I’ve picked up on two occasions).

This threading feature is what I want out of Google Reader, I call it clustering or a memetracker feature.
Actually I’ve mentioned SharpReader’s unique threading feature in a former post (scroll to the SharpReader heading):

“From an RSS reader point of view you can view a local distributed conversation from your collection of RSS feeds.
SharpReader identifies common links from feeds in your RSS reader, organises a kind of thread…”

And from their site:

“Advanced threading support allowing you to view connected items together in a threaded fashion. SharpReader detects and shows connections between items if they have same link, if one item links to another, if two items both link to the same external webpage, or if an item has comments (for feeds supporting the standard). “

So it seems Jack and myself want RSS reading made easier when we want to follow conversations (conversations that are usually tied by links).

If you read an interesting article in your RSS Reader, you no longer have to think who else in my subscriptions has linked to this article and possibly linked to other articles in my RSS Reader…with SharpReader the conversation is threaded for you, saving loads of time.

Currently in other RSS Readers you would have to click through your 200 subscriptions to see who else is talking about that article…now that Google Reader has search it’s a bit easier to get a digest, but you can’t read it all within the same window.

Note that, SharpReader only threads items together if one links to the other, and also it will thread a page to another if they both have common outlinks.

eg.
article B links to article A therefore B is threaded under A
article B also links to article Z, and article C links to article Z (but article C and B don’t link to each other) yet article C is still threaded under article B as they both link to a common page (this common page is article Z).

I can see why they call this threading, as it’s a explicit distributed conversation…articles threaded just because they both link to a common outlink is not an explicit distributed conversation, but is surely part of a clustering or memetracking feature, it’s like grouping many conversations about the same thing in the same spot.

I guess Google Reader search achieves this by keywords, if article A, B, C, and Z all mention the same term you are searching for, then you will see all these posts in the one search result (digest).
Article X and Y may have also mentioned this term, but these 2 articles don’t link to A, B, C, and Z, and don’t have any common outlinks, in this case you have more posts about the same thing.

The keyword digest has it’s benefits, but just say the conversation doesn’t have an explicit keyword in common, you are not going to get the search result digest you require…but as long as they link to each other SharpReader will thread ‘em for you.

Conversation Digests

1. based on a common keyword
2. based on links
3. based on common outlinks

a 4th point would be offering you similar items from outside your RSS Reader…so basically what we want is megite inside our RSS Readers.

A further point is posts that attract heavily threaded items may rank on the top of the pile of your latest unread items, as it’s considered popular, this way you are reading hot conversations first, then you move on to reading posts that haven’t generated much conversation yet.

But it’s all a matter of timing, just say you open your RSS Reader and article B, C, and Z haven’t been published yet, all you have read is article A.
Then the next day you open your RSS Reader and you click article B, and you see article C, Z and A have been threaded. This is important that, even though A has been marked as read, it’s still threaded.

Another thought

I found an article in my RSS Reader that links to another article in my RSs Reader, I tried to do a search in Google Reader by using the “link:” command, but it didn’t work, this didn’t work in my Reading List Google CSE either.

Even if it did, I will only get links to article A, I will not get posts that link to posts that link to article A (did that make sense)…this is a very narrow slice of the conversation, just like Technorati link search.

Whereas, BlogPulse Conversation Tracker is exactly what we are after, only if we could limit this to our OPML…this is most of what SharpReader does, only SharpReader is also nice and tidy within your RSS Reader, you have the conversation ready for the reading.

Just the same you can use BlogRovr to see who links to a post from your OPML, but then this isn’t a complete conversational digest like threading.

Publish digests

I’d like to publish a conversation digest, why can’t a threaded post, like one of Jack’s screenshots have a unique URL, or even a widget, I mentioned this here.

If Jack were to delete a feed then one of the threads would disappear from the widget, if he added a feed it may have a post that links to a post in the widget and be threaded…so these are live meme digest widgets.