Library clips

Jack Vinson has amplified my post on the searching part of your social filter, the other part I discussed was networking.

This post is a round up of a few ways to search your social filter:

DIY HTML search engine

Create a search engine (searchroll) at Rollyo, this will search the HTML of all the blogs, bookmark users, Twitter users, etc…
You could make 3 Rollyo search engines, one for all your favourite blogs, one for bookmark tags or users, and for for Twitter users. Each of your search engines can be accessible via a fancy bookmarklet or widget.

Google Custom Search like Rollyo lets you enter a number of sites to search and gives you a public page and a widget, make as many as you want, even load sites by OPML (it searches HTML)…see here, and more.

You can also make a custom search engine on-the-fly, by putting some code into your blog, it will pick up all the links on your blog pages and provide a search box to search those links…hmmm something Snap Shots could get into.

[ADDED 12/10/07: Forgot to mention you can give others edit rights]

RSS Reader search

Google Reader allows you to search all your subscriptions, by feed or tag…so there you go, straight off you have a social filter by default…not bad at all…Steve Rubel has really taken advantage of this for data mining purposes.

Communal Search Engine

Swicki is a communal search engine, see more…for our purposes you can enter your favourite websites and search your social filter.

RSS grazing

Put in all your favourite blogs, bookmark users or friends lifestreams and with some Grazr scripting you can search this social filter…see here and more.

Lifestream network

In all the examples above instead of entering the feeds of all your favourite bloggers and bookmarkers, you could add their lifestream feeds, if they have one.

One place you can make a lifestream is at Ziki by adding the feeds from your web 2.0 profiles, then you can search your lifestream, even limit to a feed. Since Ziki is also a social network you can add friends, then you can search your friends lifestreams…nice social filtering. In fact you can search the whole of Ziki, making it a general people search engine. Add a Ziki search engine to your browser.
Ziki also allows you to enter your Reading List, ie. blogs you read, I guess your lifestream is a personal filter of all the blogs you read and other content…but you can’t search your Reading List…yes you can.

So you can search your content (lifestream) and your Ziki friends content (your network), but this is your Ziki social filter, what about searching your Reading List as well…see below for the finale.

DIY Social filter engine

Lijit is similar to Ziki, you add your lifestream (which you can search in, even limit to a feed), I don’t think you can add friends (it seems you can add other users to your network, only I can’t see an add friend button), instead what you can do is add your Blogroll (Reading List), your del.icio.us network, your MyBlogLog community or add any feeds you like creating a true social filter search engine (your social filter)…they have a handy widget.

It pays off blogging about this stuff.

As Jack Vinson alludes to why search the web everytime, when you can search your social filter…you have gathered sources you trust, and sources your sources trust, and so on.
Searching your network is a great quality filter for the web…perhaps the attention web.

[ADDED 12/10/07: Lijit could extend it’s offering to include some lifestream services, this way you could add a friends lifestream…saves you adding their bookmarks, blog individually.

The difference between Ziki and Lijit is Ziki is a social network experience, you can only search you and your Ziki friends. Lijit allows you to add other Lijit users to your network, but it also allows you to add feeds from people that are not registered with Lijit…this makes it a more complete social filter (not limited to a system).

As I mentioned Ziki allows you to add your Reading List, but this is not included in the search, so really they are one step away from including external feeds into your search filter, just like Lijit.

Something I forgot to mention is that you can visit someone’s Ziki or Lijit page and search the world through their eyes.

So not only do you have your social filter, but you can search the social filter of others…by adding them to your network or by visiting their profile.

See a post from Stan of Lijit that has a good visual explanation.]

[ADDED 23/10/07: Blog network as your social filter]

[ADDED 23/10/07: BlogRovr as social filter]

[ADDED 11/11/07: Blogbar : search your outlink sources]

Yesterday I posted a list of blogs I am enjoying reading at the moment, in the post I asked the people on this list to post a list of blogs they like to read.

Do I really want to know what Jack Vinson (Knowledge Jolt with Jack) or any of the others are reading, the last thing I want is more feeds to read. I’m happy for Jack to read his feeds and use him as a social filter…he points me to (ie. he blogs about) great stuff from blogs he reads and stuff these blogs point to, saves me from reading all these blogs.
When he points to other blogs, in his blog posts, I’ll check out their archives to see if it will make my Reading List, if I find there are only occassional posts I like, I’ll just wait for Jack to post about it.

In essense our Reading list is our social filter, each feed owner reads feeds of their own, reads stuff these feeds link to, reads stuff friends email them about, etc. I was going to include surfing the net, but I don’t really do that for stuff I’m interested in, all that comes to me via RSS as a starting block, and then I’m off on a hyperlink trail. The starting block is important, if it’s quality it will point to more quality posts, and so on.
I guess you have to choose your social filter (feeds you subscribe to) carefully…you know when you see a good feed as it’s posts consistently fill your interests, and enlighten you to new interests.

I like to choose a selection of blogs that have quality insight, and some others that point to quality stuff…we can’t read every blog, newspaper, and journal that’s out there, so it’s handy to read a feed that is like a type of clearinghouse on a topic.

In fact sometimes you can subscribe up to less than 5 feeds, and they will cover a good portion of a whole topic eg. these days you only need to subscribe to about 5 feeds about the latest web 2.0 stuff, even though there is hundreds of them.

NOTE: Lijit is a lifestream service with social filtering…you can search sources you trust.

When I research a social web topic, I don’t surf the web I consult the blogs on my Reading List, I search these blogs, and I get lots of useful insight and pointers to other blog posts…I check out the blogs on the blogroll and search these blogs, etc…I save so much time searching my social filter and social graph (dare I say it), and I get fresh, quality content.

Back to it…

So if these 20 blogs, refered to at the start of this post, along with some others are my social filter, then why do I need to be in a blog social network…my network of blogs are already in my RSS Reader, each blogger I subscribe to is my social filter.

But what if I could have 2 way networking with these guys, besides adding them as contacts, (which I regard is kind of similar to what you do when you subscribe to a blog), what if I could message them (similar to email), IM them, comment on their blog in general (like a comment wall), send them links, ask them questions, etc…
I can do most of these things with these guys, I just need to hunt around their blog homepages for email and IM details to send them links or ask questions, or comment about their blog in general.

A blog social network makes this so much easier (your contacts in context) as you already have a dashboard for your contacts, communications are archived in the one spot, the other thing is you can visit their profiles and find out what they read, and who are their friends, instead of writing top blog list posts like I did yesterday, and tagging people on that list to post about blogs they like to read…so cumbersome.

You also have the benefit of asking an aggregate of people the same thing in one go, or friends that can’t help you may hook you up with someone else in the network that could be of assistance…not only do you get a new answer, you get a new contact…the power of the network.

Another handy thing about networking with your RSS Reader subscription list is that you can share links, you might say that people are sharing links in their blog posts, so you are receiving these links anyway. But what if Jack Vinson comes across a link that he wouldn’t blog about, but he knows I would blog about it, he can ping it to me in one second.

Immersed in the ‘Internet Human Buzz’ sums this all up:

““The Net’s killer app has always been other people. There are side benefits, like access to all the world’s information. But the links that matter aren’t between pages but people, and they’re strong and rich and subtle. Multiply the infinite flavors in human relationships by a thickening bundle of means-to-connect; that product is what’s new and what’s good and what’s exciting.””

At the moment we are stuck with email, or del.icio.us links for you (problem is here, you may just want to send the link without having to bookmark it in your own collection)…specific link sharing tools like Siphs, Google Shared Stuff or ShareThis come in handy.
Link sharing tools are specific as you are explicitly sent a link, as opposed to reading the stream of your del.icio.us networks or people’s Google Reader Shared Items.

So we have handy tools for communicating with people, reading feeds, sharing links…but all these in a dashboard that hook you up with your contacts in a network just makes more sense.

I think the future of information consumption is the efficiency of the RSS Reader coupled with the effectivness of the social network.

Two services making inroads into this space are Streamy and FeedEachOther…I mentioned that MyBlogLog could be another.

So what’s it gonna be, where will our blog social network be, will it be a lifestream (social network) like Ziki, or an RSS Reader (social network) like FeedEachOther, or a link sharing network like Bzzster or absorbed into a greater social network like Facebook, or a better version of a blog network like MyBlogLog.

Or will be wait for Google to announce something, supposedly on November 5th…more from Rex’s Thought Spot and TechCrunch.

Related:
Lifestream Groups
RSS Smarts
The many aspects of attention
Blog networks or blog communities?

[ADDED 23/10/07: Searching your social filter]

[ADDED 23/10/07: BlogRovr as social filter]

[ADDED 11/11/07: Blogbar : search your outlink sources]