Library clips

If like me you are absorbed with the web, as a result of participating, you would have built up a great deal of sources that are your filter on many topics.

I have lots of tags in my Google Reader filled with blogs of people I understand and trust. These people save me from information overload, I cannot possibly read everything on a topic; not everything is worth reading and I don’t have time anyway, but the stuff that is good is written and also pointed to by these bloggers.

Another thing is that overtime I have come to know these bloggers and we share context, ie. we have read each other for ages, interested in the same things, interacted with links and comments, and the person (style/personality) comes through in the blog post, which doesn’t often happen in codified documents.
All this helps in understanding the message or signal (knowledge transfer), as I think the more you understand a person, the more you understand the message (similar to the medium is the message, perhaps the messenger is the message.)

Me and my tangents, sorry about that…newbies to the blogosphere sometimes haven’t go time to immerse themselves and build a subscription of blogs they trust, this takes time, but it’s well worth it for personal experience. This also happens to me, I haven’t got time to find and build a list of sources for topics I’m slightly interested in, as I’m too busy on the topics I am interested in.

Communities and Networks Connection

Anyway, for newbies and others, there has been a movement where this stage of finding and reading blogs on a topic has been made a whole lot easier. The blogosphere has matured and blogs on a topic have proved their worthiness (blogosphere self regulates reputation) and coalesced into one convenient space.

Nancy White and Tony Karrer have teamed up to create a brilliant blog aggregation site called, Communities and Networks Connection.

This is not a community (it’s not a group space where we have an agenda)…and it’s not a network as the sources or readers don’t connect with others or have their own view of the network. Rather, it’s a simple aggregation of blogs on the topics of communities and networks.

Basically, it’s a convenient one stop shop daily read on what a bunch of bloggers are saying about Communities and Networks.

I’m excited that I was asked to have my blog listed, and I already read many of the other listed blogs, such as Mike Gotta, Matt Moore, the Anecdote team, Luis Suarez, of course Nancy White and many others.

How does it work?

Visit the website and in the middle is a stream of the latest posts from all sources. If you like reading content from the comfort of your own home then you can grab the feed.

On the right sidebar is a list of sources, clicking a source will display content from just that source.
Clicking on Library clips will show my latest posts (click for more), and if you scroll down it will show my “best” posts (click for more) based on social signals (kind of like PostRank I guess)

On the left sidebar we have a way to filter posts from all blogs by concept, tools, type, and year (a bigger picture is available on a page)

For those who want to just see posts about a tool like Twitter, or a concept like Collaboration, can filter to just these pages, or grab the feed.

And then you can filter some more, this page here is filtering to see all posts on Twitter, then filter again to see posts on Twitter and Communities of Practice, and you can keep filtering.

Now I’m not sure how these keywords/categorising work, but it’s a handy way to filter the content.

A really cool thing is that I can see all these keywords based around one source, so here’s a keyword page for just my blog.

Create your own widgets

Now you might see that not many of my posts appear here, I think that’s because it needs to keep indexing my site which apparently helps if I add the keyword widget to my blog. Not sure if I have room at the moment on my sidebars.

There are other widgets you can add, like the search and badge.

Oh yeah, I forgot, you can search the site, and even search one source.

Other blog aggregators

Tony’s has a similar site, elearninglearning, then there are the sites in which I’m often re-syndicated, Social Media Today, and Content Management Connection.
NOTE: these last to are built on Wordframe (they are more than aggregation as publishers can network with each other in this space, and Social Media Today could be defined as a loose community as some key members of that team host events, publish a newsletter, etc…)

A blog aggregator that I really find outstanding is ScienceBlogs.

Make your own blog aggregator

If you want to create your own Newsmastering site try services like Individurls, MySyndicaat, FeedRaider, Bozpage, Feedbite, Planetaki, and startpages that have public pages such as Protopage, Netvibes, PageFlakes…see my Newsmaster category for more

Cullect - is a collaborative feed aggregator. It’s a communal place to make Reading Lists. You can click on a list and read content like an RSS Reader…you can view the list of feeds in the list, tags, and who has contributed to the list (curator)…read more.

Google mobile address bar and search - here’s my blog (click the feed icon and it will open in Google Reader)…also handy as a proxy [via DI]

BlogBackupr - back up your blog, also see backupblogonline

Planetaki - create your own public news reader, simple adds feeds, and it will create a public river of news site. There a lots of these sites around, check out the newsmaster tag on my blog [via WWD]

Read The Words - convert webpages and office documents to mp3…also see Vozme. [via DI]

A while back I posted on Twitter and similar platforms in relation to groups. “Groups” is an ambiguous word, so I cleared it up to be more precise about what I mean, here’s a little re-hash:

Groups - community type shared interest member groups, or perhaps an aggregation stream from a bunch of people, like a public version of one of your contact groups (in this instance there are no members)

NOTE: Channels are similar to Groups, but people are not members. A channel is not organised and doesn’t really have an agenda beyond existing, the topic is usually short eg. #athletics. Whereas a group topic could be more precise eg. Women in athletics who have won medals but had them taken away due to steroid use, and a group could have sub-topics.

Contact Groups- organising your contacts into folders/tags

Groupings - based on implicit attention or on a slice of data such as: people who also saved this bookmark, people who also bought this book, all Twitter users located in Perth, a Techmeme cluster of all the people who posted on this meme (or all people who linked to this site)

Groups

TweetPeek (no longer exists)
Tweet Thread
Tweet Boards
Twapper (mobile)
Crowd Status
Twitter Digest
Twitter Teams (like a channel-hashtags-but limited to a group of people)

FlockUp (a communal contact group, but soon this will stream tweets)
Twitterpacks (a place to find groups or people by topic, location)

[ADDED 17/12/08: Twitter Groups]

Twitter groups in Japan

[ADDED 23/03/09 : tweetworks - twitter groups]

[ADDED 24/03/09 : Tweetizen - create a Twitter group…unlike tweetworks this is not a member based group, rather it’s public streams you can make based on keywords or sources]

[ADDED 08/05/09 : Twibes - join an open group and view the latest tweets]

[ADDED 09/05/09 : Tinker - create a keyword/group stream]

Channel

Twemes (mobile)
Hashtags
Roomatic
TweetChannel

[ADDED 08/05/09 : Twubs aggregates various types of hash tags]

Groupings
Twitterlocal
@locals
TwitterWhere
Another TwitterWhere
DailyTwitter

[ADDED 18/03/09: Nearby Tweets]

[ADDED 28/05/09: hoodlenow]

TweetMemes and others
TwitScoop
Tweeqs
Twitterholic

There are also lots of recommendation services based on groupings data, here’s a few:
Twubble
Twits Like Me
Twitter Poster
Twannabe

Contact Groups
Twitly (mobile coming soon)
Tweetdeck

[ADDED 18/01/09: TwitTangle]

Something Twitter are working on

[ADDED 25/02/09: Peoplebrowsr - enables to create contact group streams (called tags), there is also a default one called VIP. You can even search within these streams. And it does much much more.]

[ADDED 1/03/09 : Ginx does Twitter groups]

[ADDED 08/05/09 : TweetGrid - create group streams of up to 30 people]

[ADDED 18/03/09: filttr]

CONTACT GROUP DIRECT MESSAGE
Twitter Groups
TweetParty
GroupTweet

It seems some special type of Google Reader users are allowed to list their subscriptions or a selected type of reading list (or blogroll) on their “Shared Items” webpage.

Compare my “Shared Items” webpage to Barack Obama.

Now check out this promo page where you can choose from a list of Google Reader Users “Shared Items” webpages.

This is coming into the newsmastering territory, because we also get merged streams of “Shared Items” pages.

For example on this promo page it offers a link to the “Shared Items” webpages of both Barack Obama and John McCain, but it also shows a merged stream of content from both these pages, and a merged feed.
Also on this promo page are links to the “Shared Items” webpages of several journalists, and it also shows a merged stream of content from all these journalists, and a merged feed.

Both of these merged streams have webpages of their own, here’s Barack Obama and John McCain, and here’s the journalists.

So imagine…

…making your own “Shared Items” group pages, I think this will be available soon.

Get ten of your friends and create a group “Shared Items” webpage…list a link to each person’s “Shared Items” webpage, and display a mixed stream of content from all ten “Shared Items” webpages, and to be able to subscribe to one spliced feed from all these pages.

I wonder if it would delete duplicates, and if the duplicate had a “note” it would also appear on the original item.
It would also be good to click on a person from the list and limit the stream to just their “Shared Items”, rather than only having the option to launch to a new window.

Actually this kind of reminds me of a FriendFeed Room, but these rooms don’t just re-syndicate content, you can also manually post right into the page, and on top of that also have discussions.

I also wonder whether the stream will do the FriendFeed type of thing or TechMeme where you can have a popular filter.

Friendfeed have joined other lifestream services, onaswarm and Mugshot, in adding a groups to their feature set called Rooms.

Set up a public, semi-public (non members can read and comment) or private room where people can post messages and links and comments…this is something Twitter has avoided so far.

If you are member of multiple rooms you can see all content in your “all my rooms” stream.
You can also check a box so the content of a room also appears on your main friendfeed page (this saves you from having to add a Rooms feed to your main page…actually what is my main page, it must be my friends page)

This “Rooms” feature is moving away from the lifestream mainstay, is basically sharing messages and links with a group. This is different than on-the-fly tags (hash tags, Jaiku Channels), with Rooms you actually have to join, perhaps get to know the members…more of a community (I don’t know about that when the numbers get too high).

Rooms also streams feed content…an idea would be to have an option for 2 streams in a Room, one for links and messages, and one for external feed stuff.

The external feed stream makes Rooms powerful as it can be used as a topic stream as well as interactive manual submitting of links, text and comments.

Mugshot and Ziki are a similar group lifestream concept, whereas FriendFeed Rooms don’t stream the lifestream of its members into one stream, it’s purely just a place for a group of people to share text, links and discuss. Just the same Mugshot Groups allow you to submit messages and links and comments, group chat, and even chat around an item…as well as stream external feeds.

Steve Rubel is using a private Room to save links and notes…kind of a read later stream, or even a link blog/stream like del.icio.us and Google Reader Shared Items.

BTW - I finally found a mobile version of FriendFeed.

The FriendFeed Apps page has some interesting hacks that increasingly makes it an alternative to Google Reader:
- read later
- creating group streams (above I mentioned that Mugshot and Ziki have group streams, well this is a similar thing…I guess it’s like grouping people in folders and displaying a folder stream)
- filter by service
- remove visited links
- Twitter enhancements

Related:

Friendfeed : social filter conversations

[ADDED 7/7/08: 13 FriendFeed Tools for Twitter Refugees]