FreshLinks is a simple browser bookmarklet I created that you can use to get a quick understanding if a Twitter user has recently been sharing any useful links.

To install, drag or save this link to your browser bookmarks toolbar: FreshLinks

A text button labeled ‘FreshLinks’ should appear on your bookmarks toolbar. Now, first open someone’s Twitter user page, mine for example: @CleverClogs. To filter my updates and display just links that I’m sharing, click on the FreshLinks bookmarklet button.

This is a before-and-after sketch of the effect of using the bookmarklet:

As a bonus, the script excludes retweets and won’t show updates fed into the Twitter stream through TwitterFeed.

I’m obviously curious for your constructive feedback, please tweet it to the attention of @CleverClogs.

Last modified July 18th, 2009, 4:22 PM GMT +2

At just after 4 minutes, Loic asks Nick:

“Where did you get the idea, for the first time?”

Nick responds:

“We, err, we just looked at Twitter, we, the, err , a year ago we actually had a first pass of the website, and we kind of let it languish, and then we saw how big Twitter was getting in January and we took all the technology from the bit built in the company for the year before, and we just took all that and rebuilt it, really, you know, really quickly. “

Now, in contrast to the video, look at this compilation of several tweets from the very early days of TweetMeme’s inception, starting January 5th, 2008:

1. 
   CleverClogs I sincerely hope @gaberivera won’t come up with the idea to create @tweetmeme, Then again someone else might.Account name still available… 05 Jan 2008 from web
2. 
   nickhalstead @cleverclogs tweetmeme.com now registered – what shall we do with it? 05 Jan 2008 from web in reply to CleverClogs
3. 
   CleverClogs @nickhalstead that’s the general problem I have with guys: you tell them NOT to do something, next thing you know they’re in head over heels 05 Jan 2008 from web in reply to nickhalstead
4. 
   CleverClogs @nickhalstead I think I need to ask my lawyers to send you my ToS in triplicate At least I can cry “FIRST!” 05 Jan 2008 from web in reply to nickhalstead
5. 
   CleverClogs Going over @tweetmeme specs with @nickhalstead on Skype chat right now. 09 Jan 2008 from web
6. 
   nickhalstead and big thanks to @CleverClogs for help with it 28 Jan 2008 from twhirl
7. 
   mikebutcher @CleverClogs Do you want a credit on Tweetmeme story? Happy to add your role 28 Jan 2008 from Twitterrific in reply to CleverClogs
8. 
   CleverClogs @NickHalstead You may need to speak with @Noelleee about getting @TweetMeme featured on @Alltop. She’s Content Manager, if I’m not mistaken. 28 Mar 2009 from web
9. 
   CleverClogs @noelleee Nick Halstead started http://tweetmeme.com last year after a tweet from me. It has become very successful and gets quoted a lot. 28 Mar 2009 from web in reply to noelleee

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Many people know that the original idea for TweetMeme came from me. Almost immediately after I hinted at the creation of a TweetMeme service in January 2008, Nick Halstead picked up the idea, and contacted me over Twitter DM. He was enthused and kindly asked my permission to go ahead with the idea. Nick would register the tweetmeme.com domain name and would also claim the @TweetMeme account on Twitter. That evening, we had an intense Skype call and several subsequent chats about the direction of TweetMeme. We also discussed my future remuneration once the service would gain funding, though at that time it didn’t seem likely at all that this type of service would become highly popular. Nick kept me posted continually during the first development phase.

The TweetMeme Launch blog post from Jan 28, 2008 is unambiguous:

“This project has only possible because of help from a number of very talented people. So let me first thank Marjolein Hoekstra who first twittered about the concept and since then has been a constant sounding board for the project.”

Nick is correct. On just about every new feature launched since the day that TweetMeme started, I posted several tweets in a row, contacted A-list bloggers to see if they were interested, and over-all made sure people knew something very powerful was being built on top of the Twitter API. I provided Nick with very detailed and constructive feedback on how to improve TweetMeme.

In March of this year I helped Nick get Alltop founder Guy Kawasaki’s attention so that he would incorporate the TweetMeme blog feed on his Alltop Twitter category page.

Last April, ReadWriteWeb published Tweetmeme Live: See What’s Big on Twitter Right Now after RWW editors noticed a tweet from me about the new TweetMeme Live feature. The original credit footnote to the story was this:

When Nick Halstead urged me to have that credit footnote changed, I obliged immediately because I was made to believe he was going to get into serious trouble with his investors if they’d find out I was involved and might stake an IP claim. I was totally wiped out for days.

Let me summarize how I look at the situation: Nick and his team have pulled off a remarkable job building TweetMeme into a very solid, thriving company and though for obvious reasons I don’t tweet about TweetMeme much anymore, I still value and respect their work highly. However, in the video interview with Loic it seems Nick is denying my original inspiration and subsequent involvement in the development of TweetMeme completely.

My goal with this post is two-fold: to set the record straight about my exact role in the product and also to encourage Nick Halstead to openly come to terms about this. I propose we settle adequately and appropriately and then move on—as decent professionals would. Appropriate actions would comprise of a proper credit  statement on the TweetMeme About page describing  my role, and adequate recognition of my initiating role in public company statements. If a check arrives in the mail, I’ll happily cash it.

Do you think I’m being unreasonable here?

“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.

Congratulations, Betsy, Tony and everyone else on the Jing team.

Installation ran fine for me.

Jing has an attractive, animated interface that I appreciate very much. I have some concerns about being locked in to the (paid) screencast.com service, at least as it seems how you are marketing the product right now. On start-up I'd have wanted some more hand-holding.

I like how Jing auto-copies the direct URL to my most recent screenshot to the Windows clipboard.

On my wish list is of course an RSS output of all screenshots that I take. Dare I mention screenshot tagging?

Best,

Marjolein

The most annoying feed publishers in my book are those who don't respond to polite requests to fix their feed, although I must say most of them are usually very grateful for tips that help them to improve their feed.

Improvements I typically suggest are:
- add or fix the pubdate element
- increase the number of items in the feed
- validate the feed
- improve the name of the feed
- start offering keyword/tag/category-based feeds (especially for larger blogging networks)

A very stubborn feed publisher is Resourceshelf: remarkably enough and apparently through some auto-insertion mechanism their feed gets updated twice daily with a 'new' post called "The URLs for the ResourceShelf and DocuTicker RSS Feeds". Obviously there's no news in the blog post to which this feed item links...

Should you wonder: of course I requested an explanation for this by email, never to receive any response...

Hi Simon,

Mark Woodman's most recent Yahoo! Pipe lets you go even one step further: instead of hard-coding the feed URLs for each of the blogs on your list, you can just provide an OPML and his pipe will do the rest. What's more, if you update the OPML on your end, Pipes will automatically detect the changes.

For technical details, see http://techbrew.net/articles/200703/opml-in-yahoo-pipes-with-canonical-date-sorting/

Match that with a simple Grazr on your site and you can offer your site visitors a UK marketing search engine on your blog.

Dugg: http://digg.com/software/33_WordPress_Plugins_for_Feeds

Could you improve this feature a couple of notches and allow us to not just import from one feed at a time, but synchronize with a remote, dynamic OPML file?

The idea behind this is that you'd maintain a list of personal feeds in your feed reader, use its OPML publishing features to host the feed list and then make the feed items visible as a River of News on your tumblelog.

What do you think of the idea?

Couple of things I miss in Google Reader:
- option to annotate shared items
- option to publish a web-based OPML
- option to subscribe to someone else's OPML and be notified when that OPML changes
- the obvious search capabilities that others have mentioned many times before me.

I mark stuff of interest too using del.icio.us (RSSonate, mostly RSS-related bookmarks). It lets me enter 255-char descriptions so that people know WHY I'm recommending passing links on in the first place.

Before I forget, Robert: sincere congrats on the membership of the Media 2.0 Workgroup.

I’d vote for the talented guys behind Touchstone http://www.touchstonelive.com Touchstone basically scans your browsing history, your bookmarks, e-mail, documents and other stuff that characterizes your personal attention stream.

You then select the sources that are likely to produce information that might be of interest to you. It makes sense to use web feeds for this of course, or people could develop their own input adapter.

I appreciate this method of managing information overload because the Touchstone engine will only display bits of incoming information if they match your attention profile above the granular thresholds that you determine. The more important that information is to you, the more persistent and disruptive its presentation.

With lots of bloggers talking about handling information overload and attention management, I believe Touchstone provides a viable solution for a real pain.

Ties: the CEO’s a Skype buddy of mine and he once paid me dinner.

Instead of importing Lee's list to your feed reader, which in fact causes a static replica of his list, you could consider subscribing to the OPML file. This has the advantage that when Lee updates the OPML file, you'll be notified. There are several ways to have the most current version of the OPML file available: by browsing it using an online service such as Grazr, or by using the cross-platform aggregator BlogBridge, which explicitly supports subscribing to dynamic reading lists.
For the BlogBridge community I maintain several reading lists, most of which are related to RSS technology itself.

Links:
Grazr: http://www.grazr.com
BlogBridge: http://www.blogbridge.com
RSSonate directory of RSS blogs: see the Grazr widget in the sidebar of my main blog CleverClogs (http://www.cleverclogs.org)
RSS Tool Vendor News: see the Grazr widget in the sidebar of my RSS Tool Vendors blog(http://dutchisms.typepad.com/rss_tool_vendors)

I hope you appreciate the pointers.

"The main reason for me to make the switch to mySyndicaat as my preferred feed mixer is that it is capable of creating feed digests (so-called feedbots) from Reading Lists, which in fact are dynamic OPML files hosted on a remote server."

Since I first launched my directory of RSS tool vendor news feeds last September, the list has grown steadily to its current size of almost 200 feeds—an increase of 30% in little over two months. The directory is live on display in a Grazr widget in the sidebar of this blog.

I have learned a lot since my last blog post. When I realized I needed a more powerful service to create feed digests than I had been using so far, I soon discovered the incredible web service mySyndicaat, recommended by several of my online friends. 

For those who want to see the meat right up-front: here's the RSS Tool Vendor News stream, displayed using mySyndicaat's own feed stylesheet, the Power Viewer. Click on the image to see the live version of the feed. A list of top tags is displayed in the right-hand column, allowing different ways to navigate the feed.

Sidenote: some feed items (especially those from the PageFlakes team blog) seem to have been published with a publishing date that is not recognized by mySyndicaat. I'll report this, mh.

Dynamic OPML Files
The main reason for me to make the switch to mySyndicaat as my preferred feed mixer is that it is capable of creating feed digests (so-called feedbots) from Reading Lists, which in fact are dynamic OPML files hosted on a remote server. Note that I spell Reading Lists with initial capitals to make them stand out from just a list of blogs or just a list of recommended books. I maintain my own Reading Lists as categorized groups of feeds in BlogBridge and synchronize these groups with the BlogBridge server to have my updates propagated. When a Reading List is updated, anyone subscribing to it will receive a notification of the changes; any widget capable of displaying dynamic OPML files will also show the most recent version immediately. Examples of widget engines with real-time awareness of Reading List updates are Grazr, OptimalBrowser, BittyBrowser and KozOPMLBrowser.

A Plethora of Features
Reviewing mySyndicaat is almost like writing an encyclopedic wiki entry about it: there's so much I'd like to tell you about it. Let me just name a few things that seem useful for those who want to get started creating a River of News feed: the central unit within mySyndicaat is called a feedbot, which is basically the aimed end result of your efforts. In my case my feedbots are River of News feeds from other people's feeds. Each feedbot consists of one or more subscriptions, a notion that refers to a particular action that you would like the feedbot to perform. Examples of subscriptions are OPML files and individual feeds, but there's more.

Even while preparing this post I discovered things I didn't know about mySyndicaat, as it can do much more than just create River of News feeds:

• it can generate a feedbot on any topic or name, so-called Ego Feeds a.k.a. Topic Radars, pulling in results from blog search engines and social bookmarking sites


• it can generate a feedbot containing inbound links to any url, so-called Buzz Monitors, pulling in results from social search engines


• it can generate a feedbot from generic search engines, newspapers and social networks


• it lets you scrape RSSless websites


• it lets you create your own feeds from scratch


• it lets you edit and delete any item and any feed element in your feedbot

Once you get the hang of mySyndicaat, you can export your feedbots to a local OPML file on your hard drive, or you can have mySyndicaat host that OPML for you. In the latter case mySyndicaat in fact creates Reading List of its own.

Impressed with mySyndicaat's functionality as so many others before me, an evenly important reason for me to stick with mySyndicaat is the extreme dedication to customer satisfaction conveyed by Giovanni Guardalben (CEO) and Massimiliano Farnea (head developer). One issue I had a few weeks ago, where duplicate items were not removed from the final output, was resolved within several days. Replies to support requests are always prompt and to the point.

Most of my RSSorized friends have heard of mySyndicaat, but they find the user interface a bit daunting. In such cases I quickly put together a River of News feed tailored to that person's needs, just to showcase what you can do with mySyndicaat. My latest one is a River of News feed about Grazr. Creating a feedbot usually takes no more than 15-20 minutes, much less if there's already an OPML available. Working with mySyndicaat becomes a lot more tangible if you can see an example of the final output in front of you.

So, now that you know a bit more about what goes on behind the RSS Tool Vendor News project, I kindly invite you to browse the list, to import the underlying OPML into your feed reader, subscribe to it using BlogBridge, experiment to your heart's content with mySyndicaat and provide me with constructive feedback.

RSS tool vendors: if your feed is missing, or you don't have a team blog yet, then please get your act together and send me your feed.

Ok, Randy, I carried out the changes as suggested. Thanks for pointing out the error.

Of course I immediately emailed Blogdigger CEO Greg Gershman as soon as I discovered that the Blogdigger indexes fell behind.  Perhaps it takes him a while to undertake action, but so far I haven't received any reaction that would explain why this is happening. Maybe I have overlooked something—if so, then please let me know. Until then, I'm forced to take my blog search feeds away from Blogdigger. So, what does make up my ideal blog search engine? Here's my quick list:

Blogdigger, the blog search engine I preferred so much for my topic radars because of its extensive set of search qualifiers, heavily disappointed me when I discovered that a Lifehacker post titled IE7 still handles feeds better than Firefox 2.0 didn't show up in one of my "River of News" feeds about RSS Technology. Usually I blame my complex filtering techniques when something like this happens, but this time I was certain that a post that has 'feeds' and 'Firefox' in the post title definitely should have been picked up.

As you can see from the screenshot that I took a few minutes ago, the most recent item in the Blogdigger index for the Lifehacker site is dated September 24th, 2006. This is appalling if you realize that 25 more Lifehacker posts have been published since then. All of these posts appear to have been skipped by the Blogdigger indexing robots.

Of course I immediately emailed Blogdigger CEO Greg Gershman as soon as I discovered that the Blogdigger indexes fell behind. Perhaps it takes him a while to undertake appropriate action, but so far I haven't received any reaction. Maybe I have overlooked something—if so, then please let me know. Until then, I'm forced to take my blog search feeds away from Blogdigger.

Google Blog Search seems an interesting alternative: it features search qualifiers similar to those in Blogdigger and even allows me to filter search results by language—a much coveted feature the lack of which I complained about before in private exchanges with Greg. Another interesting added value of the Google Blog Search index is that it contains links to all posts of the blogs that it parses, meaning that you can search further back than Blogdigger allows. This is especially useful for high-frequency blogs such as Lifehacker.
What I also like about Google Blog Search is that you can select a high number of posts in the feeds that it generates: I usually select the ones with 100 items. Blogdigger feeds seem limited to 30 items.

Blogdigger will remain on my radar though: its group search (based on an OPML reading list that you can import) is very useful to extract posts from distinct groups of bloggers, for example the Feedster Top 500 or the BlogBridge Top 100. I will dearly miss Blogdigger's rather unique 'Exclude Feed' option: in the past I used this feature quite a lot to reduce the noise from my search results.

Geek's side note: Google Blog Search has one major disadvantage: it is very demanding about how you structure your search commands: phrases such as "best practice" and "case study" cannot be combined into one inposttitle command. E.g.: inposttitle:"best practice"|"case study" is invalid. Instead you need to repeat the inposttitle command for the second phrase, which is cumbersome if you want to combine several phrases into one search. Conversely Google doesn't seem to object against combining single-keyword queries with that same search qualifier: a simple query like inposttitle:Bloglines|Rojo renders exactly the search results one would expect.

Also note that Google Blog Search does NOT offer keyword stemming like Blogdigger does. This means that Google requires that you specify 'aggregator' and 'aggregators' if you want to find both variants.

So, what does make up my ideal blog search engine? Here's my quick list:

• search qualifiers (select by site, tags, categories, title, body, subject, language, author, relative date range, absolute date range, link)
• phrase search ("digital camera")
• proximity operators ('digital' within n words distance from 'camera')
• Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, with their respective symbol representation +, |, -)
• keyword highlighting
• stemming ('aggregate' will match with 'aggregate', 'aggregates', 'aggregation', 'aggregator', 'aggregators' etc.)
• search within results (first make a set, then refine that set with more specific keywords)
• named persistent queries (persistent query#1 = 'rss', 'feeds' and 'aggregator'; e.g., run "query#1 AND ('Firefox' OR 'Opera' OR 'Flock')")
• query builder (a wizard that shows the available commands with their syntax and examples)
• query validation and optimization (tell me about missing quotes, brackets, invalid qualifiers, conflicting commands etc)
• extended search string length (a query length of 2000+ chars would be nice)
• masking ('news*'—note the asterisk—will match 'news', 'newspaper', 'newsroom', 'newsfeeds', 'newsreader' etc.)
• search order prevalence using parentheses, with nesting allowed
• exclude individual items and entire blogs/feeds from the search results
• report blogs as splogs
• RSS output  (preferably 60 items or more)

Lastly, it would be nice if I could have an account with a blog search engine. This would then allow me to save the details of my queries so that I can finetune them or reuse portions of them when I return. The next step would be to have my search feeds exported as an OPML file.

I'd be delighted to hear how you create your search feeds, especially if they're complex. I seem to have been rather late at the party (again!) in finding out about Windows Live Feed Search as it's not directly visible from the live.com start page.  I'll explore this latest kid on the block in more detail next. I already noticed it has a huge set of qualifiers and offers search macros. Until then it makes sense to assume there are other engines out there that could serve my purpose just as well as Blogdigger and Google Blog Search have done until now.

"My "River of News (by bloggers)" feed from the RSS Tool Vendor News project, which collects posts from the blogosphere about RSS tools and RSS technology, all of a sudden looks very different and, in a way, even mesmerizing when displayed using NewzBubble."

Creative ways have been devised to visualize RSS feeds in the past. In Visualising RSS: playing with WizaRSS and S5 Pascal Van Hecke lined out how to create step-by-step, web-based tutorials from RSS feeds, we've all seen tag clouds of various shapes, colors and sizes, and now there's NewzBubble , a free service that displays an animated representation of the keywords used in any feed.

My "River of News (by bloggers)" feed from the RSS Tool Vendor News project, which collects posts from the blogosphere about RSS tools and RSS technology, all of a sudden looks very different and, in a way, even mesmerizing when displayed using NewzBubble. Creating a buzz cloud like this is pretty simple and doesn't require signing up:

"The idea behind this project is to have one single page where anyone with an interest in RSS technology can get the latest news: feature announcements, version releases, reviews, blog posts and any other bit of news—as long as it is related to RSS. It's the most complex piece of newsmastering I've taken on so far, not just because I wanted to get feeds from the vendors themselves, but also because I wanted to exclude search result noise as much as possible."

I proudly present RSS Tool Vendor News, a collection of approximately 150 news feeds from RSS tool vendors. This is a dynamic reading list, which means that it is continually updated. As with my other project RSSonate, I use BlogBridge, FeedDigest and Grazr to accomplish the results. Some of the feeds are created using Blogdigger or a feed-filtering service.

A couple of notes about my selection criteria: I only include feeds in English and only if they fit within the scope of the list. For example: if the majority of the posts turns out to be not RSS-related, then I don't see much use in keeping the feed on the list. Feeds that grow stale may eventually be removed. I did not ask permission up-front from each vendor to include their feeds. If you prefer that I remove yours, please .

The idea behind this project is to have one single page where anyone with an interest in RSS technology can get the latest news: feature announcements, version releases, reviews, blog posts and any other bit of news—as long as it is related to RSS. It's the most complex piece of newsmastering I've taken on so far, not just because I wanted to get feeds from the vendors themselves, but also because I wanted to exclude search result noise as much as possible.

I decided to publish about this project while it's still very much in progress, so that I could adjust my vision based on feedback that I will hopefully get. Feel free to email me with submissions, corrections and omissions. Suggestions for improvements are welcome too.

Note how you can alter the display of the Grazr widget into a classic three-pane aggregator by clicking on the controls in the top-right corner.

Unfortunately, not all RSS tool vendors provide some kind of feed: as far as I can tell the following vendors / publishers do not offer a company blog, a development news feed or any other channel of their own writing:

24eyes
AgileRss
Blago NewsReader
BusterNews
Eskobo
Feed2Podcast
FeedAlley
FeedFeeds
Feedlet
feedmap
feedmeme (and other sites from the same company, like BlogSieve)
FeedPath
Feedreader (Update 2006-11-05: feed located and added to the list)
FeedTier (Update 2006-11-05: now called Feedity; I added Ashutosh Nilkanth's projects feed)
Findory (sent Greg Linden request for a latest-news feed)
fwicki
fyuze
Inform (sent Peter Longo and team a request for a latest-news feed)
Lockergnome News Feeder
Mobifeeds (feed seems broken, notified development team)
Neomyz RSS Web Reader
NEooWS (feed seems broken)
NewsFarm (French blog + feed only)
NewsMob
NewsPiper (sent their team a request for a feed)
Microsoft Onfolio
pheedfire
PulpFiction (by Freshly Squeezed Software, couldn't find a feed)
reblog (project news feed added to the list)
ReminderFeed (news page lacks RSS)
Rezzibo (Spanish; English translation in progress)
RocketInfo
RSSCalendar
RssReader (request for news feed submitted to developers)
shortwire
SimplyHeadlines
Waggr (for sale; should this stay on my tracking list?)
YeahReader (Update 2006-11-05: feed located and added to the list)
YourLiveWire (request submitted)
Zeemo RSS (request for news feed submitted to developers)

Please if you have the url to a feed for any of these vendors.

Update 2006-11-05:  the River of News feed for all vendors is now in place. It splices all of the feeds into one huge feed. I created it using MySyndicaat and it's listed at the top the way it used to be. You may have noticed that I also force newly discovered feeds to appear at the top, so that you can quickly see what's new. The feeds are now properly sorted too. Thanks to several vendors who have supplied me with their feeds. I will keep maintaining the list of missing and malfunctioning feeds.

On my list of to do items are currently:

1. Add another River of News feed with blog posts discussing RSS in general or any of the products mentioned in the digest. These posts are retrieved from blog search engines like Blogdigger using an extensive keyword filter. (Work in progress, relies on bug fix in FeedDigest)

The piece that caught my attention is at the end:


attachLoadEvent = function( func )
{
var old = window.onload;
if( typeof old != 'function' )
window.onload = func;
else
{
window.onload = function( evt )
{ old( evt );
return func( evt );
};
}
}

What does this do?

Secondly, I think some finetuning is needed to the <body onload..> instruction for Google AJAX Search (Google AJAX Search : Instructions for TypePad Users)

I'm turning off comments for this particular post to prove that the search box displays fine when comments are disabled. If you want to comment, you could do so by writing a blog post of your own and using the trackback url for this post, or by sending me an .

If you noticed the nice Google AJAX Search widget on my main blog CleverClogs and you are a TypePad user yourself, you may wonder how to implement this on your own blog. Because I realized over time CleverClogs had been updated with all kinds of customized templates and quite a few snippets of Javascript, I decided to create a new blog from scratch just for this project. The Google AJAX Search blog that you read now is public and serves two purposes: to explain to other TypePad users how to implement Google AJAX Search, and to experiment with the code so that it works on all pages with an optimum of features and under all desired circumstances.

Another reason for me to create this blog is so that Six Apart support representatives (like Jen, for example), the Google AJAX Search development team and fellow TypePad hackers can follow along and perhaps provide suggestions for improvement. The ideal ultimate outcome of this exercise is that will become easier to implement Google AJAX Search on anyone's TypePad blog.

Summarized Instructions:

1. Prepare (Google AJAX Search API key; backup; choose weblog)
2. Convert to Advanced Templates
3. Modify the <body> tag
4. Clone three default Template Modules
5. Add Google style sheet to "head-common" Template Module
6. Modify the Index Templates and Template Modules that depend on "head-common"
7. Create a new TypeList for the search box
8. Add TypeList to "sidebar" Index Template
9. Publish your blog

Detailed Instructions

STEP 1: Prepare

Apply for a Google AJAX Search API key. It's a simple process with immediate gratification and requires that you agree to the license terms displayed. On the same screen where you get your Google AJAX Search API key rudimentary HTML code is displayed to try out your new key.

Before you start amending your TypePad configuration: make a backup of your templates or start a new blog from scratch just like I did. I suggest you read all of the instructions through in advance and then carry the steps out in sequence. It might take you about one to two hours to finish this, depending on your level of experience dealing with Advanced Templates in TypePad.

STEP 2: Convert to Advanced Templates

Convert your blog templates to Advanced Templates. Apply the Advanced Templates design to your blog.

STEP 3: Modify the <body> tag

Choose the "Edit Design" option for your weblog and open the Main Index Template for editing. Then  add the following attribute to the <body> tag: onload="onLoad();"

So in my case, the body tag looks like this:

<body class="layout-two-column-right" onload="onLoad();">

Save your template and apply the same change to the Individual Archive Index Template.

STEP 4: Clone three default Template Modules

Head over to TypePad Knowledge Base Answer 137 and clone the default TypePad Template Modules head-common, head-index and head-individual by copying the source code from each module and creating new ones. Save each Template Module. If you haven't worked with Template Modules before, then do read and follow the instructions at the TypePad Knowledge page about Template Modules carefully so that you know what you're doing.
The idea is that you force the TypePad system to apply the new Template Modules on your blog instead of the default ones.

STEP 5: Add Google stylesheet to the "head-common" Template Module

Add the following line to the bottom of the <head> section of your "head-common" Template Module:

<link href="http://www.google.com/uds/css/gsearch.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet"/>

This line loads the default set of Google AJAX Search styles. It's quite a list of all kinds of settings. One of them determines the width of the seach box. I had to override the default value because it was too wide for my sidebar, so I added this:

<style type="text/css">
.gsc-control {
  width: 200px;
}
</style>

STEP 6: Modify the index templates and template modules that depend on "head-common"

Apply the following changes to the templates created in step 4:

in the "head-index" Template Module change the line that reads <$MTWeblogIncludeModule module="head-common"$> into <$MTInclude module="head-common"$>
save the template module

in the "head-individual" Template Module again change the line that reads

<$MTWeblogIncludeModule module="head-common"$> into <$MTInclude module="head-common"$>
save the template module

in the "Individual Archives" Index Template change the line that reads

<$MTWeblogIncludeModule module="head-individual"$> into <$MTInclude module="head-individual"$>

save the template module

in the "Main Index Template" Index Template change the line that reads

<$MTWeblogIncludeModule module="head-index"$> into <$MTInclude module="head-index"$>
save the template module

STEP 7: Create a new TypeList for the search box

Create a new TypeList of the type Notes, name it "Google AJAX Search", click on Add a new Item, leave the Label field empty and add the following code to the Note field:

<div id="searchControl"></div>

<script src="http://www.google.com/uds/api?file=uds.js&amp;v=0.1
   &amp;key=Put_Your_Google_AJAX_Search_API_key_here"
   type="text/javascript"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">
    //<![CDATA[
    var searchControl;

    function onLoad()
    {
    searchControl = new GSearchControl();
    searchControl.setLinkTarget( GSearch.LINK_TARGET_SELF );
    var blogSearch=new GblogSearch();
    blogSearch.setUserDefinedLabel("LabelYourSearch");
    blogSearch.setUserDefinedClassSuffix("siteSearch");
    blogSearch.setSiteRestriction ("url/ to your blog"); //e.g. "http://www.cleverclogs.org/"
    searchControl.addSearcher(blogSearch);
    searchControl.draw(document.getElementById("searchControl"));
    }

    function searchControlClear()
    {
    searchControl.clearAllResults();
    }

    //]]>
</script>

STEP 8: Add TypeList to "sidebar" Index Template

Add the this line to top of your "sidebar" Index Template:

<!--#include virtual="/lists/google_ajax_search/module.inc"-->
Save the template.

STEP 9: Publish your blog

Make sure you publish all of your templates by choosing Publish All Files from the dropdown box.

This is the first version of my instructions. Please help me by providing feedback. I'll incorporate your suggestions in my text if they are appropriate.For the time being I'm going to leave this post as a featured one on the homepage of this blog. Follow-up posts will be listed in the sidebar.

UPDATE: Sept 15th, 2006: In a public comment Marc Lucovsky, architect of Google AJAX Search, provided feedback to simplify the script. I gratefully incorporated his suggestions. They definitely make the script easier to follow. Note that there's now also a tab above the search results that indicates from which site the results are retrieved.

Hi,

I'm trying to accomplish the same result as you have for WordPress. I started out by creating a TypeList item, but as far as I know a TypePad TypeList item can't pull in the textual contents of the current blog post.

I may revert to this TypeList idea one day, but just for the purpose of finding out if it's possible to pull in data from the $MTEntryBody$ variable I now copied the entire script to an Advanced Template that I created and started playing from there.

This exercise brought me to the point where I'm able to display a (rather boring) button right above the main post on my home page http://www.cleverclogs.org. You can go there and try out yourself.

The button DOES open the Zap Reader panel with text that I hardwired into the underlying code.

The code does NOT process dynamic text yet and I doubt whether I'll be able to have it parse selected text in any post. There may be browser security issues about this, I don't know yet.

Note that although a coder in my very early years I'm not a die-hard programmer at all. Any advice is welcome.

Kindest regards,


Marjolein Hoekstra