Feeds in BlogBridge are basically a stream of articles, generally from a blog or news source or something like that. These are the feeds that you’ve always known and loved - RSS, Atom and all that.

SmartFeeds are magic! They are created based on rules that you specify. An example should make this clear: What if you could search all blogs at any time for occurences of the word “Microsoft”? Wouldn’t that be useful? And what if that search just ran all the time, and you got the results of the search as a feed? A SmartFeed!

Another example: what if you wanted to see all the information from the feeds in a certain guide that was still unread? Or all the information from 3 BlogStar Feeds that came in today?

You can do all that, and more, with SmartFeeds.

Using SmartFeeds

You create a SmartFeed with the (duh) “Create SmartFeed…” command. The first option is the most important: where do you want to collect articles from? Either you can look within your own sets of subscriptions (”Collect Articles from My Own BlogBridge Feeds”), or you can ask BlogBridge to work with a variety of search engines on the web to build up the result. Let’s look at each in turn.

Collect Articles from my own BlogBridge feeds: This SmartFeed will look through all the articles, feeds and guides that you have subscribed to with BlogBridge and pull together those that match your conditions. Unread, BlogStarz, Date, Text, and Feed name can all be used to define which ones you want. There are all sorts of ways to use this - what I can say in general is that BlogBridge is looking at all the stuff that you are subscribed to, in whatever feed or guide, put it all in a single list for easy browsing.

Now the rest of the SmartFeed flavors follow a very similar pattern. The key difference is that, instead of looking through the stuff you have subscribed to, it looks far and wide, over the whole internet - whether it is pictures on Flickr, or links on del.icio.us, or tags on Technorati (and there are a few more.) It’s really a great way to keep up with what’s going on on the web that you may not even know about.