“Agglom’s basic function is that you can publish your current browser session to the web, requiring little more than a single click…. The saved session then becomes available in three formats: as a web page that displays the links, as a URL slideshow, and as an RSS feed.”

Every couple of weeks I scan Mozilla’s Firefox Add-on site for new additions. I’m especially attracted to the ones that affect browser tab behavior. Last week, while I was actually looking for a Firefox 3.0 compatible alternative to SessionSaver, a little gem popped up that I hadn’t come across before: Agglomerator. Contrary to many browser add-ons that I only keep enabled on my system for a few hours, I’m finding Agglomerator and accompanying service Agglom.com promising enough to stay.

Agglom’s basic function is that you can publish your current browser session to the web, requiring little more than a single mouse click. Shared links can be multi-media or just plain web pages. I created a simple one from Chris Brogan’s personal-branding posts. An even richer example of what Agglom is capable of doing is this Agglom set I found, with videos, photos, links and other resources about Olympic ‘pool shark’ Michael Phelps.

Agglom hands-on
If you’d like to experience hands-on what Agglom can do for you, just read this paragraph. Start by signing up for an account on the Agglom service. Then, install the Agglomerator add-on and restart your browser. Now a new, modest toolbar button becomes available, labeled “Share session”.

Next, make sure you have a bunch of tabs open that you’d like to save as an organized set. Press the Agglom button to save any or all of the tabs you currently have open, then label this custom tab set with a title of your choosing, assign tags as you see fit and lastly publish the set as a private or public list. The saved session then becomes available in three formats: as a web page that displays the links, as a URL slideshow, and as an RSS feed.

Agglom slideshows
Besides the ease with which you can publish collections of URLs, I am particularly impressed with how slideshows are implemented in Agglom. Any set you create on Agglom automatically has a slideshow attached to it that uses the original URLs.  At the moment Agglom slideshows are not progressing automatically. From what I understand the Agglom developer is planning to add this feature, depending on user feedback. Here’s what the Agglom slideshow interface looks like:

What else?
Agglom sessions can be easily changed: you can change the sort order of the links by drag and drop, you can add new links and remove old ones, change their title and URL and adjust the privacy settings.
Public Agglom session links can be accessed through their URL by anyone—no Agglom account is required.  Agglom users can leave comments on the lists that you share and even submit suggestions for improvements to the owner of any list. Here’s what an Agglom page looks like in edit mode, in this case for an Agglom set I created from David Tebbutt’s series of posts on how to handle the press, Media Skills 101:

Company background
Agglom is the prodigy brainchild of 23-yr old Enrico Foschi, an Italian web developer living in Bray, a town close to Dublin, Ireland. Enrico launched the first version of Agglom just over a month ago and has improved the service at an amazing pace since then. Here’s a 3-minute video from Agglom’s early days, in which Enrico explains what the service does:

Today Enrico launched Agglom Beta 3.1 with the blog post Agglom.com adds URL slideshows, RSS and easy link suggestion.

Company feedback
Agglom has accounts both on Twitter, as @Agglom, and on Get Satisfaction.

Suggested improvements
Realizing Agglom was only launched fairly recently, I am already much impressed by its current feature set. In the past few days Agglom developer Enrico displayed a remarkable flexibility in not just listening to and rephrasing the suggestions I made, but even more so by implementing the majority of the improvement ideas we generated together. Yet, there are a few aspects of Agglom that deserve attention:

• Unclutter the web site. Agglom offers lots of functionality. New users might be overwhelmed by the many links, icons and other pieces of information.
• Leave out the advertisement for the Agglomerator add-on when a user has already got that add-on installed.
• Replace the current list of bookmarking service in the sidebar by one generic link to a service like ShareThis.

• adding the Summize search plug-in
• creating a Summize quick search command
• using the SmartSearch add-on to perform in-context queries

Summize Search Plug-in

Add Summize to your Firefox search bar by clicking on the “Install Search Plugin” link on the Summize home page:

The search plugin is available for use immediately after installing. To enter a Summize query, put cursor focus on the search bar with your mouse or press the Ctrl-K keyboard shortcut. Then type your query as usual and press Enter.

Summize Quick Searches
Besides performing searches from the search bar, Firefox also offers the browser address bar to execute search commands. It comes in handy if for some reason you’d rather not change search engines from your search bar. The functionality to search from the browser address bar is generally called Quick Search. In our case you would type in something like “s Obama”, press Enter and then, because of a keyword shortcut command that points to Summize, a query is run automatically to find tweets about Obama. The Quick Search command you can create by following the step-by-step instructions is also useful for in-context searching, which I describe in the section Summize Smart Searches.

The Summize Quick Search command is universal and only needs to be created once. Luckily, Firefox makes this creation process a piece of cake: right-click with your mouse in the Summize search input box on any Summize web page and select “Add a Keyword for this Search…” from the context menu.

Now you may try your newly created Quick Search command by carrying out a query from the address bar: Type “s [keywords]” without the double quotes and press Enter.

Summize Smart Searches
With a few simple steps you can perform a Summize search for any word on any web page displayed in Firefox. The steps to create the Summize Quick Search command that I described in the previous section are required to make this Smart Searching functionality work. First, install the SmartSearch Firefox add-on.

Note that the default, version 3.10, is meant to be used with Firefox 3 beta. Users of older versions of Firefox should install version 3.7, which you can find here: SmartSearch add-on for Firefox 2.

Restart your browser.

Next, open the SmartSearch Settings dialog box and put a check mark in the option Show “Search Web for …” item

Next right-click or select any word(s) that you want to search for on Summize, and select Search for [keyword] on…“, then select @Summize. The following screenshot shows a fun recursive search right from my WordPress editor window, looking for tweets about Summize:

This nifty SmartSearch in-context search functionality works immediately by right-clicking individual words, without the need to select a word with your mouse first. Alternatively select multiple consecutive words, right-click on the selection, and follow the same steps.

My compliments to Ben Goodger and Chris Povlrk for providing the excellent SmartSearch add-on, and of course to the Summize folks (@abdur, @gregpass, @ericcj, @jayvirdy), who in my opinion really created even more than the Google of Twitter. Chapeau bas!

Once I’ve figured out how to successfully import my old posts here, I’ll probably transfer them so that I can terminate my contract with TypePad. I have been wanting to get rid of TypePad for so long but would rather not lose my content. TypePad doesn’t just host CleverClogs, but also AWesome, my first attempts at blogging ever about ActiveWords. I also ran a bunch of other experiments. It will take me a while to get up to speed with WordPress.

The pieces on my previous blog were usually quite lengthy and required lots of research and preparation. Sometimes I’d work on a post for a whole day. I’d like to use this new blog to practice writing shorter articles, so that the barrier to actually start writing becomes less high.

So, please animal with me while I get to know this bear

“Twype allows you to grab tweets from *any* Twitter account (there’s no
authentication) and lets you publish that stream as Skype mood
messages. Twype only works from Skype for Windows PCs.”

A new Skype add-on named Twype was just released by its developer Julian Bond. I’m very excited about it because it offers tremendous opportunities and because it fulfills a desire I’ve felt for years ever since I started using Skype. Let me explain what Twype does with a mix of screenshots and text:

Nothing special so far. To have this tweet and all my subsequent ones appear on my Skype mood message, I installed Twype using the direct download URL. Note that Twype will only run from Windows PCs and that you’ll need to put it in your start-up folder to make it run every time you use Skype.

After installing Twype, Skype will prompt you to confirm that you approve the Twype add-on:

After you approve Skype’s request, you’ll see this screen:

Type in your Twitter user ID and press “Get Tweet Now”. With my own ID I get this:

In this screenshot you can clearly see that Twype also appends the time stamp of the most recent tweet to your mood message. Now, feel free to minimize this panel, because during this Skype session, Twype will grab your tweets every five minutes.

You can find Julian’s original announcement from today on his blog Voidstar in the post Announcing Twype.exe.

Posting your life stream on Skype
If you do some quick thinking about the other Twitter tools that are already available, then Twype finally lets you post your life stream to your Skype mood message. What you’re doing, where your attention goes, where you are travelling, can now all be posted to your Skype mood message. The steps you need to take are:

1. Create a life stream feed (tons of tools for that, Ziki comes to my mind first)
2. Create a new Twitter account
3. Authenticate with the credentials of your new Twitter account on Twitterfeed
4. Provide Twype with your Twitter account name

Robert Sanzalone from the pacificIT Skype chat room created a digg for Julian’s post, which I kindly welcome you to support:

“If you want to inform yourself of the basic principles of attention profiling or need to explain the concept to others then please read on. Feel free to add your clarifications, your
conclusions and your constructive criticism to this deliberately non-geek conversation.”

In recent months quite a few bloggers covered the growing adoption of APML, a proposed standard for attention profiling. Those about to give up reading here already, please don’t. I personally found most of these posts delving in rather deep. If you want to inform yourself of the basic principles of attention profiling or need to explain the concept to others then please read on. With today’s post I’d like to make an attempt at writing a layman’s article answering exactly these three questions:

1. What is attention profiling and what are the benefits?
2. What tools and services already support or endorse attention profiling?
3. Where could you go next?

As usual, this post concludes with a news radar.

I encourage you to participate in this deliberately non-geek conversation about
attention profiling, either by posting a comment or by writing a blog
post of your own. Feel free to add your clarifications, your
conclusions and your concerns.

Attention Profiling
I like introducing attention profiles
as consolidated, structured descriptions of people’s interests and dislikes.
The information about your interests and how much each means to you
(ranking) is stored in a way so that computers and web-based services
can easily read it, interpret it, process it and pass it on should you
request and permit them to do so.

In today’s post I confine myself to describe services that are capable of handling attention profiles based on the proposed APML standard. To
make it easier for humans to recognize that files containing an
attention profile indeed are attention profiles, we label them with the
file extension “.apml”.

Technically attention profiles can be stored, accessed and updated from multiple devices and multiple operating systems.

In February 2007 Web 2.0 industry analyst Emily Chang sparked an avalanche of comments with her blog post My Data Stream. Looking back, Emily’s post could be considered the tipping point that led to many online conversations about attention, spawning new technology start-ups promising to solve the problem Emily described. The first few sentences from her post:

“As the calendar rolled to 2007, I kept wishing I could look at all my
social activity from 2006 in context: time, date, type of activity,
location, memory, information interest, and so on. What was I
bookmarking, blogging about, listening to, going to, and thinking
about? I still had the urge to have an information and online activity
mash-up that would allow me to discover my own patterns and to share my
activity across the web in one chronological stream of data (to start
with anyway).”

I strongly suggest you read Emily’s post in full. The nice thing was that Emily kept updating her post with links to related items as they appeared. Don’t skip the ensuing conversation in the comments, as it is still alive today.

Emily recently chose Engagd to store her attention profile. Click on the image to open the full profile:

Attention profile sources
Though not an exhaustive list, your attention profile could be based on:

• pages you bookmark and tags you assign
• your favorite videos, music and TV shows
• hyperlinks you follow and share with your friends
• things you write about and topics you keep track of
• items you click on in your feed reader
• things you buy from a web store
• places you visit and events you attend

Purpose of attention profiling
Attention profiling has multiple aspects. To me the most important
aspect is that it allows me to reduce my information fatigue
considerably. If I have enough time on my hands I’m still free to
wander off on the web and jump from one page to the next. However, in
the usual circumstance that my time is limited and my attention is
scattered between tasks competing to top my to-do list, my attention
profile helps me to focus on my core interests. Prerequisite of course
is that the services and tools I spend most of my time with are aware
of the existence of my attention profile.

The privacy aspect of attention profiling is brought up quite
often when I talk to people. They consider their APML as their private
property and are usually afraid their browsing behavior will be exposed
to prying eyes. I look at the privacy aspect of attention profiling
from a different angle: right now sites like Facebook and Google
collect usage data from and about me. They know about my interests,
they know what sites I open and they know who my friends are. At the
moment all this is a one-way operation: they collect the data that I
give to them and I get no insight as to how they filter the content they or their advertisers offer to me. I prefer to have that information distilled into an
attention profile so that I can at least have control over whom I share
this information with.

Of course there’s a commercial aspect to attention profiling as well: most people know and appreciate Amazon’s recommendation engine. Actually this mechanism is Amazon’s proprietary attention profiling system based on the product pages you open and the items you put in your shopping cart. Imagine being able to take this profile with you onto other web sites that are
capable of producing dynamic content based on your interests. So it’s not just
about niche targeting of advertisements, but also, for example, about removing
sports pages from the home page of my favorite news headlines site once it
becomes clear I’m not interested in soccer and baseball.

Building your own attention profile
The smartest way to
get started having your own attention profile is to sign up with
attention-profiling service Engagd.
Engagd is a site where you can have your attention profile generated, updated
and dynamically hosted.

The direct URL to my profile is https://apml.engagd.com/apml/cleverclogs.is.engagd.com
(!).

After signing up with Engagd, you’ll be taken to the Engagd Profiler, a page where
you can specify from what kind of attention data Engagd should generate your
attention profile. I’ll be explaining each of these straight away. The Engagd
Profiler can process these types of files:

• individual web pages
• RSS feeds and OPML files
• Life stream feeds (technically RSS feeds)
• APML files

A single web page that just happens to reflect your
interests fairly well suffices to build an APML file. Just provide the URL of
that page and Engagd will build an attention profile from it.

RSS feeds and OPML files
The Engagd Profiler can process
individual RSS feeds. Just paste the URL of your RSS feed into the input box. I
found out that the Engagd Profiler works even better if you provide it with the
URL of a list of RSS feeds (OPML).

Life streams are a slightly more advanced, but also a
considerably more accurate way to start your own attention profile. In most
definitions of life streams they refer to a continually refreshed stream of the
bits and pieces that constitute your personal interests. Life streams are
usually generated by combining updates from multiple RSS feeds. Some people’s
life streams are simple, containing just the items they select in their feed
reader and the bookmarks they create. Other people’s life streams can turn out
to be complex and voluminous, depending on their productivity. Mine is somewhere
in between: you can see it in action in the black widget above the fold here on
CleverClogs. I named my life stream CleverJots and its contents
fluctuate while I sign up to try out new services.

Here’s how I added my life stream to the Engagd Profiler. The URL that you
see in the input box is generated by the service that I used to create my own
life stream: FeedBite. FeedBite lets you
combine multiple feeds into one. It also provides you with an OPML file that
they host for you. It’s the URL for this OPML file that I pasted into the input
box:

The reason I submitted my OPML file and not the single CleverJots feed is
because the Engagd Profiler turns out to be better capable of distilling my
interests from the individual feeds constituting an OPML file (categories and
tags still being intact), than from the combined feed.

Here are the feeds that the Engagd Profiler discovered in my OPML file:

As you can see from this screenshot, all of the feeds included in my profile
are releated to my activities on the web: content I create, comments I write,
links that I share. The more personal the feeds you offer to the Engagd
Profiler, and of course the more items those feeds contain, the better it can
distill your interests.

There are quite a few services that let you create a life stream. From rather
simple, wizard-led websites to full-fledged newsmastering services, most of them
create a custom feed or an OPML file for you that you can use as the basis of
your attention profile.

To learn more about life streams and how to create them, check out John
Tropea’s in-depth coverage of all services in this market in his post
about life streaming services over on his commendable blog Library Clips. What I like about
John’s reporting style is that he puts each service within its context: what
other services are there, how could you benefit from each of them and what
potential does each of these have.

I’d also like to point to the Google Blog Search feeds that I included in
this post’s news radar. You’ll find the radar at the bottom of this post.

Mark Krynsky maintains a quite
active blog that just deals with life streams. It’s aptly called the Lifestream Blog.

APML files - it makes sense that a service that stores your
APML file for you is also capable of importing one, so that’s not too difficult
to understand that the Engagd Profiler can import those directly, I presume.

So, where would you go to obtain or generate an APML file?
Well, the number of tools and web services that actively support APML is growing
steadily. APML awareness means that developers add functionality to their
product so that it can import an APML, enrich it with personalized attention
data generated by their own product and pass that information on to other
products aware of APML.

Among the web services that have jumped on board the APML train are Dandelife and Cluztr. From recent insinuations on the
Bloglines blog, it is expected that Bloglines will soon join the ranks too. If
you’re a Windows user, then you may want to check out Particls, a desktop program that turns
keywords and feeds into a continuous display of relevant news items.

Exploring further
A growing collection of questions and
answers about attention profiling in general and the Engagd service in
particular can be found on the Engagd FAQ wiki
page.

If you would like to know more about the APML specifications and track their
development, I suggest you start out by signing up for the fast-growning public APML discussion group on Google
Groups. Just click on the link and choose the Join option. You can actively
participate or just lurk for a bit and see what kind of topics other members
come up with. A thread I find particularly helpful is the “introduction” topic,
where members are encouraged to introduce themselves and explain from what angle
they have joined the group.

APML on facebook
Another option is to sign up for the APML group on
Facebook. As of this post’s most recent update (2007-10-28) it has 268
members.

An open standard, APML is the subject of lively debate among the members of
the APML Workgroup (click to see
a current member list). Starting point are the APML specs. If you believe that you qualify
for Workgroup membership (vendors-with-plans,
XML-specialists-with-constructive-contributions), then write to Chris Saad
directly or start out with the public forums on Google Groups and facebook
mentioned in the previous paragraphs.

Attention Profiling - Roadmap for the nearest future
It’s
quite safe to assume that Web 2.0 service vendors are closely watching this
space. Some are waiting for the big players to adopt the technology, others
prefer to lead the way themselves. I personally would not be surprised at all if
notable players such as del.icio.us, Clipmarks, StumbleUpon, Digg and web page annotation services such as Diigo and Fleck would become APML aware.

Then of course there’s the group of RSS tool vendors and feed aggregators. I
have quite high expectations from vendors of top-notch products such as FeedDemon, NewsGator Online and BlogBridge. The Google Reader developers may find
that implementing support for APML fits their strategy of streaming additional
personalized content and advertisements to their enormous user base.

Further reading (updated 2007-12-30)
Quite a few solid
posts have been written since I wrote mine. The announcement by NewsGator
Technologies, Inc that they’ll implement APML throughout their product range
(and likely their API) is definitely a highlight. Here’s a selection of the ones
you might be interested to read:

Explaining
APML: what it is & why you want it (by Elias Bizannes, 2007-10-10)

FeedDemon,
NetNewsWire and NewsGator Inbox to Support APML (by Nick Bradbury,
2007-10-15)

Attention -
NewsGator and Bloglines Join APML Workgroup (Digg
buster by Marshall Kirkpatrick, 2007-10-15)

More
support for APML this time from NewsGator one step closer to the Enterprise
(by Daniela Barbosa, 2007-10-15)

Now
with APML support (announcement by Adam Kalsey, developer of Feed Crier and
IMified, 2007-10-15)

Newsgator
implements APML: the value of standards in an open world (by Ross Dawson,
2007-10-15)

Considerations on Google Reader and APML: How
Google Reader can finally start making money (by Elias Bizannes;
2007-10-16)

Do I
have your attention? (by Brad Feld, 2007-10-16)

FlexiScale,
APML and MiniBar (busy week) (by Nick Halstead, 2007-10-21)

Lifestream
to APML (by Emily Chang, 2007-10-21)

APML: The Next Big Thing or the
Next FOAF? (by Mark “rizzn” Hopkins, 2007-10-22)

Adventures
is lifestreaming and attention - part one (by Piers Jones, 2007-10-24)

Attention Profiling & APML
(by Elliot Turner on Aqua Regia, 2007-11-02)

Attention
Profiling: APML Beginner’s Guide (by Michael Pick on Master New Media,
2007-11-14)

lifestrea.ms
goes into private beta (by Aaron Tan on Confessions of a Technophile,
2007-11-14)

Should BlogBridge support APML ? (by Pito Salas, CEO of BlogBridge, 2007-11-15)

Explaining APML to Suda (by Ian Forrester on Cubicgarden.com, 2007-11-18)

An APML Experiment (by Paul Lamere, Sun Labs researcher, 2007-11-21)

APML Support for WordPress (by Matthias Pfefferle, 2007-11-28)

APML for Del.icio.us (by Paul Lamere, Sun Labs researcher, 2007-11-30)

User Centric design and identity with Beacon (by Uno de Waal - South-African blogger - 2007-11-30)

Coverage in other languages

In Dutch: Attention
profiling: ja graag! (by Tibor Paulsch, 2007-10-12)

In Italian: Attention
Economy: Bloglines e NewsGator adottano l’APML (by Enrico Bertini,
2007-10-16)

In Portuguese: APML:
uma forma de dizer ao mundo o que merece sua atenção (by Bruno Torres,
2007-10-17)

In Spanish: APML,
crea y controla tu propio perfil de atención (by Alvaro Castaño,
2007-10-17)

In French: Qu’est ce que
l’APML: Attention Profiling Markup language (by Julien Grière,
2007-10-19)

In Japanese: ?????????????????
APML ?? (2007-10-22 on Social Networking.jp)

In Greek: APML
- Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (by Stelabouras on Wigger.gr,
2007-10-23)

In French: APML
- Attention Profiling Markup Language (by Mathieu Favez, 2007-10-27)

In German: APML
- Sag mir wer du bist und ich sag dir was dich interssiert (by Cornelius
Scholz, 2007-10-28)

In Italian: Le
Metriche attenzionali e l’APML: uno strumento per misurare l’autorevolezza sul
web? (by Sacha Monotti on MediaMeter, 2007-10-30)

In Swedish: Är
framtidens sociala sajter asfalterade med OpenSocial och APML? (by Fredrik
Wass on bisonblog, 2007-11-07)

In Lithuanian: APML - prekyba
interneto sielomis (by vienastoks on nežinau.lt, 2007-11-13)

In Russian: APML - ???? ???????? ??????? ???????? (translation of Michael Pick’s post by Daniil Bratchenko, 2007-11-21)

In Spanish: APML y el perfil de interés del usuario(by Antonio Cordiz, 2007-11-21

In German: APML - Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (by Matthias Pfefferle, 2007-11-23)

In Russian: APML – ????? ?? ???????? ???????? ? ??????? (by Svetlana Gladkova, 2007-11-30)

In Swedish: Låt APML bli en genväg till användarna (by Björn Fant, 2007-12-28) - This article was also published on the online edition of the Swedish MacWorld (also by IDG).

In French: APML, un profil dont vous êtes le héros (by David Larlet, 2007-12-30)

Attention Profiling Grazr
I’ve put together a quick
reading list that you can copy if you like. The top feed aggregates items from
the other feeds with the most recent item appearing at the top of the
list:

And by request:

A full-page version of the Podcasting Professionals news radar is hosted on the PODHANDLE servers. To give you an idea here’s the reduced-size version:

Besides integrating external services, this news radar contains some
more goodies: firstly, users of Firefox and Internet Explorer 7
can add a Podcasting Professionals search plug-in to their drop-down list of search engines. More about this in the second part of my post.

Secondly, if you don’t like the custom color scheme, then you can instantly select any of the other thirteen Grazr themes.

Lastly, you can send feedback to me using email or Skype chat right from the Grazr panel.
The
Skype icon at the bottom of the news radar reflects
my online availability and instantly opens a chat session with me.
Needless to say I look forward to your reactions. I’ll conclude this
post by summing up the challenges I’m still facing developing advanced
Grazr applications.

The conception of this project
Before I start explaining what you can do with Podcasting
Professionals, I’d first like to thank Karin for inspiring me.
Throughout the development of the widget Karin has given me
very valuable feedback on its functionality, looks and usability.

Credit to Karin Hoegh
When
I met up with Danish podcasting consultant Karin Hoegh during my brief
stay in Copenhagen last August, she told me that as far as she knew
there was no reliable and up-to-date list of podcasting consultants
available yet. Such a list would be relevant to anybody professionally
involved with podcasting technology and consulting. Karin happens to be
co-founder of PODHANDLE, a web
service that allows unexperienced users to create podcasts and embed
them on their site in a straightforward and visually attractive way.

I asked Karin if she’d like me to help her create a list of
feeds from podcasting consultants and
easily convinced her to use Grazr to build the list. After refining the
scope of the project, Karin and I spent quite a few hours collecting
the feeds, defining relevant keywords and debating criteria
for list inclusion. More details about these criteria in Karin’s post about the project: Podcasting Consultants Use News Radar To Expand And Professionalize Their business.

Soon I decided to focus my efforts on the
Grazr stuff while Karin handled the feed management using BlogBridge
Feed Library. I’m very grateful to the BlogBridge people that they allow me to experiment with this web service to host my CleverClogs public reading lists.

News Radar Features
Every news radar I build starts with a
list of feeds. The one I’m presenting today contains the feeds from
over 50 podcasting consultants and professionals, supplemented with the
results from two highly focused Google Blog
Search queries. I merged these feeds into one new feed called Recent headlines.

Most people like the instant search functionality in Grazr. I’ve
taken this feature to the next level by providing links to services
that let you process the search results in your preferred way. What
each of these external services have in common is that they allow feed URLs as a keyword parameter. Simplified, such a URL would look something like this:

http://www.feedservice.com?feed=http://myfeed.xml

If you happen to know of other services that allow URL parameterization like this, then please let me know.

Here’s what you can do with your search results:

1. Grazr search and custom-keyword feeds
As usual, you can
search through the recent headlines
by keyword. Just click Search, provide your search word(s) and press
Enter. As soon as you run a query, you’ll
notice that there are three additional options available. The first one
is to simply display the filtered search results inside Grazr. Behind
the scenes, Grazr opens the recent-headlines feed and adds a keyword
filter to it. The underlying technology for this is provided by mySyndicaat, for several years in a row the most powerful newsmastering service on the market.

If you like the search results and would like to track them in your feed aggregator,
then right-click on the node with the orange RSS icon and copy the feed
URL to the clipboard. You can then pass this URL on to your RSS reader.

Please note that some of the more advanced features of this news radar have been disabled in August 2008 due to technical issues.

2. ZapTXT notifications
If the keyword search you created
is important to you, then you may want to explore more immediate
notification options, for example ZapTXT. This service notifies you of new search results via e-mail, instant
messaging, Skype or SMS. ZapTXT works independently of your operating
system, works with any e-mail client and supports Skype and all of the
major IM systems.

By clicking on the green ZapTXT badge in the Grazr panel you’ll summon the web service to create a
so-called ZapTask from the custom search that you just created. If
you’re not a ZapTXT user yet, then you’ll be prompted to create an
account. Just specify through which channels you want to receive your updates and you’re all set.

While implementing the ZapTXT integration, I teamed up with CEO Sameer
Patel and lead developer Paul Vaillant of ZapTXT. Both went out of
their way to make their service play nicely with Grazr. Sameer maintains the ZapTXT Blog.

3. Particls attention stream on your desktop
The third option, offered by
Particls, is primarily of interest to Windows users. Particls is a
desktop utility that offers relevant news items while you work. I’ve
written about Particls more than once on CleverClogs, but here’s a summary:

The default notification mechanisms used by Particls are a system tray notifier and a vertical
ticker bar that docks to the left-hand side of your screen. From your web-browsing behavior, from your bookmarks and
from various other interests Particls distills a personalized, granular
ranking scheme. This scheme is called an APML file, or attention
profile that is stored on your hard drive. From the many sources that
might be of interest to you, Particls selects the most relevant ones
and presents them to you while you work. The more important a news item, the more persistent its means of disrupting you.
Both in functionality and visual design Particls is the most
sophisticated personal-ranking tool I’ve evaluated in the past few
years.

As soon as you click on the orange Particls badge, a custom
installation package is built based on the search that you just created
in the Grazr panel. If you have Particls installed already, then it
will complement your existing attention profile with the data from the
new search. If you don’t have Particls installed, then of course the installation file will take care of that.

BlogRovR news fetcher
If
it’s part of your job or passion to track whether your podcasting peers
have or have not yet covered some new exciting service, product, event
or headline, and to quickly be informed of in-context news updates while you are browsing the web,
then have a look at BlogRovR. I’ve tried various ways to explain this
extraordinarily cool service, and this one seems to stick with people
well: once you enable BlogRovR, it will provide you with summaries of blog posts that discuss the page you are currently visiting, from people you determine as being authoritative.

In this news radar I’ve incorporated a custom version of BlogRovR
containing 50+ feeds from podcasting professionals. When you click on
the BlogRovR node in the widget, you’ll be prompted to install the
BlogRovR plug-in for Firefox and you’ll be guided through the
installation (browser restart required). If you already are a BlogRovR
user, then your BlogRovR subscriptions will be extended with a group of
Podcasting Professionals feeds.

Search plug-in
I’ve always been jealous of people who are
able to customize the behavior of Firefox, be it with an old-fashioned
extension, a bookmarklet, a Greasemonkey script or any other add-on. I
know enough about Javascript to do a decent amount of staring and studying
of someone else’s code in order to adapt it to my own needs and I’ve actually
gotten away with some RSS-related scripts I wrote in the past. I hadn’t
looked at search plug-ins until a couple of months back, however.

A search plug-in lets you add  a particular search engine to the
Search Bar in your browser (Firefox or Internet Explorer 7). In Firefox
you can put cursor focus on the Search Bar by pressing Ctrl-K. Most
people have Google and a couple of others listed among their preferred
search engines.

The search plug-in I’m presenting today demonstrates that the same
Search Bar technology that is used to search on the bigger search
engines can also be used on a much smaller scale: in this case to search through the posts from all podcasting professionals without having to visit the Grazr panel first.

Creating your own search plug-in isn’t that difficult. Visit searchplugins.net
and just fill in the text input fields on the Plugin Generator page. If you want to be credited as
the owner/creator of a search plugin, then sign up for an account so
that you can assign the plugins you created to your account. This also has the advantage that you can edit your plug-in at a later stage.
Searchplugins.net also provides you with the code that you need to
embed on your site to let people add your search plug-in to their
browser.

To install the Podcasting Professionals search plug-in, just click on the link with the PODHANDLE icon.

To do
Here’s a list of things I wasn’t able to resolve:

• Instantly show the search results of a query, instead of having to click on the “Show recent headlines, filtered” node.



• Make the feed names under the Full list of podcasting professionals
  indent, so that the entries align nicely to the right of the RSS icons.



• Make the feed names in the News Items panel consistent with the feed names from the Full list of podcasting professionals.

Challenges
Although I’d have liked to make you believe
otherwise, creating advanced news radars like Podcasting Professionals is truly complex.
As you may know, Grazr basically parses an OPML file and presents its
content in a web-based browsing panel. Most people these days think
that an OPML file is a list of feeds, but Grazr can handle much more
than that. I’ve included my own visual effects (an entirely new CSS
theme), links, textual paragraphs, background images, icons, javascript
code and I’ve integrated services from third-party vendors.

The complexity from this news radar is probably only visible if you’d study the underlying OPML file. Let me know if you’d like access to it.

What’s
struck me most is that although most vendors are extremely helpful,
relying on them in order to make the next step in the project can
sometimes be painstaking. All of the services that I use here,
BlogBridge Feed Library, mySyndicaat, ZapTXT, Particls, BlogRovR and of
course Grazr, are either free services altogether or their use has been granted to me for
free for this project (thanks guys). Free tools are nice, but it also
means getting timely support is increasingly difficult.

My biggest challenge of all is to find alternatives for each of the top-notch services I use, should they become unavailable for whatever reason. A clear example of this is mySyndicaat: a few months ago the owners of this outstanding newsmastering tool informed me that they’ll soon change their business model to that of a paid service. None of the other feed-splicing services currently available could replace mySyndicaat.

The base functionality of Viper Room is to let you see the live webcam streams of up to four people in a video-conferencing room. Note that Viper Room does video only: to also hear the people in the room, you’ll have to set up a multi-party voice conference, for example using Skype. The rationale behind this deliberate decision is that voice-conferencing is already handled well by other services. It’s really the video conferencing part that is was missing.

Update: On June 19th audio was added to Viper Room: click-and-hold the loudspeaker icon in the top-right corner of the Viper Room panel and you’ll be able to speak. Keep the mouse button pressed down even while listening to your room mates to have a lively conversation.

So here’s Viper Room, offering very quick access to a shared video conferencings room—no sign-up required. Just go to the Viper Room website and you’re good to go. For those interested: Viper Room is based on Adobe Flash.

Viper Room basicallly comes in two versions:
There’s a generic version hosted on the Viper Room website, which lets you create a conferencing room on the fly with any room ID you desire: just make up any name, type it in and press Enter . The room exists for as long as there are people in the room. I’ve been using this version over the past couple of days with several of my friends on the web and everybody was amazed at the quality.

Then, just a few minutes ago, Ashod pinged me to tell me that he’s made another fully customized version available, with a fixed room ID determined by the website owner and that can be embedded on any website. I inserted the HTML object code here in this blog post, just to demonstrate how easy it is to make this work:

(HTML code removed because it generated a problematic error message on the MeBeam website)

Now imagine how this could work to communicate with visitors of your website: you could invite them into a live multi-person demonstration of your service. You could do the voice part by phone, by VoIP, or by any other service.

I’m also thinking this could be very cool for communication among larger teams: misunderstandings are much more easily captured from facial expressions than through typed chat or even voice.

Please use the comments for ideas how this very practical solution can be put to good use. Ashod welcomes constructive feedback very much. He promised me he’d raise the number of slots in a room to 8 (and up to a maximum of 32) as soon as the first inevitable glitches have been ironed out. Expect kick, ban and other administrative controls as well.

Updates:

For those who want a disposable Viper Room of their own:

<object width="660px" height="520px" id="vroom" align="middle"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always" ></param><param name="quality" value="high" ></param><param name="scale" value="exactfit" ></param><param name="movie"  value="http://www.mebeam.com/uploads/Main/mebeam.swf"></param><param name="flashvars" value="room=cleverclogs&bordercolor=0xd0e0f0&backcolor=0xf3f6ff&menubordercolor=0xaaccff&menutextbgcolor=0xd0e0ff&menutextfgcolor=0x6060c0" ></param><embed src="http://www.mebeam.com/uploads/Main/mebeam.swf" flashvars="room=cleverclogs&bordercolor=0xd0e0f0&backcolor=0xf3f6ff&menubordercolor=0xaaccff&menutextbgcolor=0xd0e0ff&menutextfgcolor=0x6060c0"  quality="high" scale="exactfit"  width="660px" height="520px" name="vroom" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></embed></object>

Given the positive response this post is receiving, I’m including a button for the digg that someone submitted:

Read on if any of these catchwords appeal to you:

• lifestreams
• information overload
• personal relevance
• attention profile
• keyword monitoring
• importance-correlated disruption

I’d like to point out two remarks in today’s announcement on the Particls Blog that I definitely consider highlights: firstly it is now confirmed that a Particls version for OS X is in the pipeline. Secondly, bloggers and web site owners can share their Particls setup with a custom sidebar badge, such as this one:

Particls for OS X coming
The upcoming OS X version of Particls now officially being mentioned in a communique issued by Faraday Media is a real milestone. Ever since I got acquainted with the two creative minds behind Particls, Chris Saad and Ashley Angell, in February 2006—and also when I briefly met with Chris in person in San Francisco last December—the sensitive topic of Mac lovers feeling heavily neglected was frequently brought up.
"Ping me as soon as they make an OS X version available!", has probably been the most often heard reply from the tech journalists on my contact list when I would approach them with a brief but substantial update about Particls.

Ok, that said, what I haven’t managed to get hold of from the developers yet is an estimate release date for the OS X version, but I trust they’ll attract sufficient additional funding soon to make the first prototype available within a year from now. Until then Particls runs fine under Parallels Desktop for Mac.

Getting the download
Particls is now freely available for download from the Particls Download page. I suggest you get acquainted fast, because I’ll be shifting to fourth gear shortly.

CleverClogs focus
I figured that a couple of other tech news sites would likely do a perfect job offering an introduction to the core functionality of Particls (see Track Your Favorite Topics … on Digital Inspiration from a few days ago, glance through my Particls news radar for a live-updated list of reviews, or refer to the Particls FAQ), so I decided in this post I might as well focus primarily on the publisher aspects of the product. Please follow me to the Particls inTouch introductory page while I describe the technical, practical aspects of this new Particls partner program.

Particls inTouch installer packages
Particls inTouch lets you share your own customized version of the full Particls installer package on your website. There are two flavors of inTouch, a basic one that generates an installer from a single feed or from a set of feeds (OPML),  and an advanced one targeted at publishers obviously offering more granular control. I’ll describe both here.

inTouch Basic
inTouch Basic is the most simple way to offer your readers a Particls installer package: just type the web address of the website you’d like to track and copy the code from the box on your screen.

inTouch Basic also lets you enter the URL of a single RSS feed or from a set of RSS feeds, a so-called remotely hosted OPML file. Most online RSS aggregators allow you to create an OPML file and they’ll host it for you. The advantage of this is that any changes you make to your list of subscriptions is immediately reflected in the OPML file. Remotely hosted OPML files are often referred to as Reading Lists. If you are looking for high-quality OPML files around a certain topic, then browse the BlogBridge Topic Experts Guides. This library of OPML files offers tons of feeds on topics such as marketing, politics, online education and science & technology.

Here’s my inTouch Basic badge that simply tracks CleverClogs posts using Particls:

inTouch Partner
inTouch Partner offers publishers full control: after signing up for an account, they can choose which feeds to include with the package, which keywords to look out for, which ones to avoid, and they have the option to change the look and feel of all of the Particls screen elements, such as the logo and text color on the ticker and on the pop-ups. A personalized set-up file is generated and then hosted on the Particls servers so that your readers can download and install it. The inTouch user account allows Particls Partners to modify their settings later on.
My CleverClogs installer package, should you want to try it, is located at

and the underlying web address points to

http://intouch.particls.com/download/?mode=1&pid=1014

Creating a Particls inTouch Installer Package
To have Particls host an installer package on its server, a user account needs to be created through the Partnership Sign-up form.

After signing up, a rather straightforward edit form opens that lets you enter the details to create the package:

Just for the fun of it, I added a CleverClogs logo to my ticker bar by changing the following options in the Settings and Skins. I then followed the instructions to upload the Particls skin file to their server:

This is what my Particls ticker looks like now:

Creating your own branded version of Particls
I had no difficulties creating my own Particls badge. In fact, you could use any badge image as long as you make it point to the web address at which Particls stores the installer package.
In short, these are the steps once more:

1. Read the overview page of the Particls inTouch Partner program
2. Sign up for the service at the inTouch Admin Console
3. Create your custom installer package
4. Get the code for your badge
5. Insert the badge code into your blog

Ideas to improve Particls
It’s obvious I like Particls as it is very much already. Still, there are a couple of things I’d like the developers to pay attention to (!):

• Commit to releasing the OS X version and communicate about it
• Allow the Particls client to regularly poll a remote OPML and adjust the feed list accordingly
• Make it easier to quickly find back items that just scrolled off the screen
• Increase the font size of the ticker items
• Display the source of individual feed items in the alerts if not identical to the feed source (especially important for "River of News" feeds)
• Allow changing the URLs of feeds in the "Manage my feeds" panel

Particls News Radar
I’ve collected a couple of feeds related to Particls. Please feel free to use the comments section to suggest another feed.