“Everyone” knows about del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site which seems to have become the poster-child for tagging. As it turns out, there’s a similar, lesser known site called Connotea.org which is specifically meant for the scientific community:

“This is Connotea, a free online reference management service for scientists created by Nature Publishing Group […] Connotea helps you store your reference list online, which means that it’s readily accessible, it’s linked directly into the literature and it’s easily shared with your colleagues. Opening your references to other researchers enables you to discover new leads by connecting to the collections of those with similar interests to you” (from Connotea’s home page)

We are glad to announce step one in BlogBridge’s integration with Connotea, with the Connotea SmartFeed. Step two is going to be even cooler Here’s what you can see in the current weekly update of BlogBridge, 1.11:

Clicking “Create SmartFeed” in the BlogBridge toolbar, and choose “Connotea” in the drop down menu. This will create a new SmartFeed searching Connotea for references that include the specified tags, “H5N1” in this case. (Know what that is?)

With this a new SmartFeed is created. Whenever this Feed is updated it will check with Connotea for any new references that have been tagged.

Here’s what the new H5N1 Feed looks like right now.

You can see the first few references that mentioned H5N1, and the relevant publications, Effect Measure, EPIDEMIca, Canada.com, Newsday, Manila Times, World Health Organization, etc. Can you imagine how valuable this is for someone working in the field?

Of course this list of references will be constantly updated as new publications or links are tagged by users around the world. (Note by the way, that the tags are determined by the people doing the tagging not by some centralized overseer.)

Pretty cool, eh?

Technorati Tags: connotea, science, tag

Tim Bray writes the Ongoing blog where he often has great commentaries on what’s going on in the world of Technology. He ran across BlogBridge because, as it happens, ongoing is, right now, the most popular feed among BlogBridge users. Here’s some of what he says: 

” … it downloaded itself and started itself and imported NetNewsWire’s OPML just fine and seems like a pretty slick aggregator. It uses the spacebar for just about anything (if Brent Simmons were Microsoft, he’d have a U.S. Patent on this by now). Furthermore, it claims to sync itself up between different computers (haven’t tried that) and since it’s Java it ought to work about the same on different kinds of computers (what a concept, eh?), so I can see something like this being a real attractive package for some people…. ” (from Ongoing, emphases mine)

Thanks for the kind words!

But there is more: 

“But I clicked on Download, and then on Macintosh, and there was a discouraging little note along the lines of “No special Mac packaging, click here.” So I did, and it was a Java WebStart, and soon I was wondering why you’d need “Special Mac Packaging” anyhow… ” (from Ongoing, emphasis mine)

This is strange, there is no special Mac packaging needed – we are totally cross-platform – I wonder if Java webstart screwed up again (as in here and here and here) Anyway, we are investigating.

And there was still more: 

“One gripe; it’s slooooooooooow; the UI is nice and responsive, but scanning my 130-odd feeds is an order of magnitude slower than NetNewsWire. These days, things like NetBeans and LimeWire have proven that there’s no good excuse for shipping a slow Java app.” (from Ongoing)

Good point! We have been focusing on that, and it is greaaaaaaaaaaaaaatly improved, and for those of you willing to try the “paint still wet” weekly version (1.11) you will see a dramatic improvement. You can get the weekly release by clicking this. There are lots of other good new things in 1.11 that will make it interesting for anyone to try!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, java

This last couple of weeks we were mentioned in so many blogs and podcasts - there are too many to create a separate post for each of them. So again, I will list a roundup of reviews and mentions that we found recently.

First - thank you Shel for mentioning us on your Immediate Release Podcast. I will bug you again soon to get your feeds as an upcoming topic expert.

We also made it in the article on Business Week’s Blogspotting about small businesses successfully using blogs.

We also got great mentions on the following blogs:

• Big idea
• ソーシャルネットワーキング.jp
• Library clips
• igooi’s Web Findings
• The next America
• RSS diary
• Ballpark.ch
• Mark Evans
• Batalion.com
• New media hack
• Billionaire business man
• Floozle/Invictus

Again - thank you all - it is because of your support that we can be successful in helping Info-junkies deal with their information overload a little better!

[Technorati Tags: blogbridge rss reader expert]

Here’s something that I’ve needed for a while, a way to clean up all the old drek feeds which I played with but never look at. I am sure you have them, in nooks and crannies that you’ve forgotten about. Well with today’s Weekly releaase, 1.11 we proudly bring you the Feed Cleanup Wizard:

Here’s how it works. In the top part you see several criteria that you can use to choose what feeds you want to delete. In the bottom part you see the list of all the feeds that you’ve indicated. When you click on Run Cleanup, after a final “are you sure”, the selected feeds are deleted. That’s all there is to it.

Now some more details. If you look closely you see that each listed Feed is preceded by a check box. This allows you to further fine-tune what feeds get the axe. And below the list of feeds there’s a sentence summarizing what will happen, for example, “Cleanup will delete 80 out of a total of 432 Feeds, and 0 articles.”

Now lets review the criteria that you can use.

• First of all, you can simply limit yourself to a particular Guide or apply the wizard to all your guides.
• You can also limit yourself to Feeds rated less than a certain number of BlogStarz. So if you are the kind of user that has rated their feeds, then you may want to delete all those rated say 2 or less BlogStarz
• If that’s not useful, you could also try to see what Feeds haven’t updated in a while. That’s usually an indication of something that’s either dead or dying and not deserving of your attention.
• Talking about attention, of course you can simply go by your own behavior: put the spotlight on Feeds which you just haven’t been looking at. Now realize that as this is a new feature, it doesn’t know anything about what you’ve looked at in the past, just starting today.

Of course you can combine each of these settings to further refine your hit list. And have no fear because you get a chance to confirm your choices before anything drastic happens.

Phew! Well there are actually several other major features in 1.11 but I will write about those next week.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogbridge

The synchronization feature helps you to be in sync with your two or more work places. It also can play a role of persistent storage (or repository) for your subscriptions, preferences, tags, ratings, etc. It makes utterly no magic and is pretty simple.

We have several actions available: “Only Load”, “Only Save” and “Full Synchronization”. The first two are straight forward and what they do comes from their names. “Full Synchronization” is a conjunction of the first two. The application first loads your subscriptions and then saves the merged list back to the service. Here’s where the confusion creeps into some minds.

Imagine that you had two feeds in your subscription list. You do “Only Save” command and service records them. Now you decide to remove one of them and change the rating of the other. At this moment you see everything as it should be. But what will happen if you will as to “Only Load” your subscriptions from service? This for a while…

Yes, it will load both of feeds. The one, which has been removed, will be restored; the other will be left untouched. Why the first will be restored? Just because it’s not clear, whether it was removed or never existed. To understand it better, imagine that you are at your friend’s computer where the list of subscriptions is empty. You do “Only Load” command to load your favorite reading. The service should tell both of the feeds to match the last saved state from your own computer. And BlogBridge should add both of them.

To help you working with synchronization, we added three modes of synchronization: periodical, automatic and manual. Manual mode is often clear to everyone. When in automatic mode application loads your subscriptions from service during application start and saves them on exit. It allows you to have up-to-date state on the service most of the time. Periodic mode work like the Automatic, but with exception that it makes these operations with specified periods.

I wish to assure that we have several improvements to this in our minds. They are mainly targeted on improving intelligence of processing.

The fact is that we have many Linux users today and some of them suffer from the same problem — they can’t start BlogBridge application second time without going to our site to click the installation link. No doubts, it’s weird and we have decided to write this small FAQ (or tutorial, whatever) to help you get started faster.

First of all, what’s happening when you click the installation link on our site? Your browser takes this link, analyzes it and finds the application which is capable of handling links of this type in its repository. If browser has no handler registered for the given type of links, it will ask you for a proper action. We all seen the dialog with options to choose proper application or save the contents of the link to file, right?

Now you have a basic understanding of what’s happening behind the scenes. Under Windows or Mac Java applications can be installed in Applications menu and the shortcut link can be placed on your desktop automatically with your permission. It also possible under Linux platform, but under some conditions Java Web Start manager fails to do so. Unfortunately, we don’t know the exact prerequisites for this to happen. If you are lucky and you can’t see any traces of BlogBridge in your Applications menu under Gnome or KDE, you still can get them there, manually. This is how to do that.

Remember I told you two paragraphs above that browser calls some application to deal with resources it doesn’t know how to handle? The application which is called for JNLP file (see installation link) is Java Web Start manager (javaws). Find this application on your computer whether by issuing the direct whereis command in console, like this:

$ whereis javaws

or by using any other file finding capabilities. If you can’t find any then make sure that you have Java Runtime installed. You can get a free copy for yourself at the official Java Web Start site.

Now that you know where the file is create the shortcut on your desktop or new launcher in the Applications menu which is calling the following command:

ABC/javaws http://www.blogbridge.com/install/XYZ/blogbridge.jnlp

where:
ABC — is a path to javaws application, and
XYZ — is one of versions (final, beta, weekly)

You can name the shortcut in any way you like and assign any icon, but I wish to warn you: do not use version number in the shortcut title, just because the application will update itself to a newer versions automatically and soon you can find the discrepancy between what your links says and what you really have. I mean versions of course.

Let us know about your experience with this tutorial. Was it useful? Were there any subtle and unclear obstacles? We also will be very glad if anyone could share his own experience of doing the same with us or let us know about the cure for desktop integration illness under Linux.

Have a good time and take pleasure in reading!

The most probable explanation is that BlogBridge cannot contact service application to exchange some information. It sits on this site (www.blogbridge.com) and listens to requests on port 8080. Most of the time you don’t need to know about the ports as your browser always uses default port 80 to connect to the pages, your IM uses its own port, e-mail client talks to the server through its own and etc. That’s why in 99% of cases administrators should leave only few ports open and contactable through their firewalls to make people happy. If you are working for the company with dedicated hardworking network administrator with a good deal of paranoia, you will find that the access to our desired port is blocked.

To verify that you can try clicking on the test link below. Unless the port is blocked you will see the blank page. Otherwise there will be time-out error, or site cannot be contacted, or some other weird error message.

http://www.blogbridge.com:8080/

Now that you are on the short leg with ports hackery, you can contact your network administrator to request immediate assistance in opening the port you can live without any longer. And don’t forget to talk to your boss after that — he is going give you a rise!

Robin Good, who recently wrote about BlogBridge on his site, has agreed to become a topic expert in the categories of Online Collaboration/Web Conferencing as well as Visual Presentations and PowerPoint. Thank you Robin!

For the category of collaboration/web conferencing, here are his recommendations:

• Ray Ozzie - feed here
• Om Malik - feed here
• Kolabora News Radar - feed here
• CollaborationLoop - feed here
• Conferzone - feed here
• ConferencingNews - feed here
• Bioteams.com - feed here
• Shared Spaces - feed here

Get Real - feed here

• Many to Many - feed here
• Blue Oxen - feed here
• Peter O’Kelly’s Reality Check - feed here
• Nancy White’s Full Circle Associates - feed here
• Online Collaboration - feed here
• Technorati tag “Online Collaboration” - feed here
• Technorati tag “Web Conferencing” - feed here
• Delicious Web Conferencing (2) - first feed here, second here

For the category of Visual Presentations and PowerPoint he recommends the following feeds:

• Cliff Atkinson - with feed here
• Geetesh Bajaj - feed here
• Ellen Finkelstein - feed here
• MasterViews International - with feed here
• Tony Ramos - with feed here
• Presentations.com - feed here
• PowerPoint YahooGroup - feed here
• Visual Being - with feed here
• Delicious tag PowerPoint - feed here

As with previous topic experts, their feeds will be available in BlogBridge when you load the application. Over time, the expert may change his recommendations in certain categories and that would be refelected in your BlogBridge reader as well!

Stay tuned for more great “human” guides…

[Technorati Tags: robin good blogs expert]

This is a chicken-and-egg announcement, but if you were having trouble accessing this site over the last 24 or so hours, we indeed had an outage, but we are back up now. Thanks for your patience.

Yes. Control/+ and Control/- (or Command/+ and Command/- on Mac OS X) will grow and shrink the font size. You can also try different themes to see if you like any of them better (see Preferences)