Here’s a screencast to illustrate the power of BlogBridge’s SmartFeeds. Basically a SmartFeed, like any other feed, displays a bunch of articles. But in the case of SmartFeeds, they can be collected, based on some criteria, from a all your Feeds. Click on the thumbnail on the left and watch the movie!

So for example, here I show how easy it is to create a single feed which constantly discovers anywhere your name is brought up in any feed that you have loaded in BlogBridge, an “ego feed” as we call it! Click on the image to the left and you will see BlogBridge and hear my own voice (with a cheap microphone) showing and telling you how to do it.

You can easily extrapolate from that how you might create a Feed of, for example, all the unread articles, in feeds with the word politics in the title, that have been posted in the last week. And so on.

Of course there are many other kinds of SmartFeeds, which I will illustrate in a Screencast coming to a theatre near you, soon!

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Not all feeds are created equal, right?

Some feeds are regular blogs with post after post. But some of them, for example, from Del.icio.us, actually aren’t posts at all, they are a list of links. Others, for example from www.flickr.com aren’t posts, they are a bunch of pictures.

We thought, “why oh why should they all be displayed the same?” After all, I think it was the early Romans who knew that one displays pictures as a photo album. Why not BlogBridge? More compact, more usable and just easier on the eyes.

So with the next (not this one, the next one) Weekly Release we are introducing the concept of Feed Types Initially there will be three types: “Photo Feeds”, “Link Feeds” and “Traditional”.

We will automatically detect what kind of feed it is and use the right kind of display. The image on the left is on an early sketch of BlogBridge (yes, that is BlogBridge) displaying a Photo Feed.

What do you think?

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Why is BlogBridge a downloadable application (like NetNewsWire and FeedDemon and others) and not a web based (like Bloglines and Findory?)

As the small yet energetic group of people bringing you BlogBridge, clearly we have to make some basic choices, and indeed web vs. app is one of the biggest ones. Truth is we know that we can’t possibly please everyone and that’s ok.

Even our newest BlogBridge topic expert, Richard MacManus, prefers web-based systems. Is it because Richard’s beat is Web 2.0?

I am not going to tell you that having an application is always better than being a web site - and I am not necessarily agreeing with the opposite either.

But I thought it would be worthwhile to explain why we chose the path we chose:

• Rich user experience: No matter how wonderful your AJAX is, there are still well known and severe limitation to the kind of elegant user interface you can build. Lots of people like GMail, but even more love Outlook.
• Highly responsive: Achieve a speed and responsiveness, with drag and drop, direct manipulation, elegant controls that are just wonderful.
• Doesn’t require a web connection: I guess this speaks for itself. I can use BlogBridge without a live internet connection. Yes, always-connected is coming, but it’s been coming for, what, 10 years?
• Decentralized infrastructure: Maybe a bit parochial, but to run a web based application we would have to provide a scalable infrastructure of servers (like you can be sure Weblines have.) With our approach, you bring your own CPU cycles.
• I’m a desktop-app guy: Definitely parochial. My background and interest is in rich user interfaces that really leverage the platform and are just nice to look at, so that was my bias when we first started.

No doubt there are some disadvantages, and I know them well: applications need to be downloaded and installed, which is a real barrier for users; if you use more than one computer, you need to install the application on each one.

These are not religious positions, I am not claiming that I’m making a bulletproof argument - I am not trying to start an argument! - just giving a little bit of the background of why BlogBridge is the way it is, that we realize that it’s not for everyone, but that we believe it’s good for our target users.

I just came across this in my files. It’s not that new, but It’s quite relevant to what we are doing with BlogBridge and our strategy as it is evolving:

“We need to accept that the online landscape is changing rapidly, and not necessarily in a way that makes things easier for us. Those who deal with the issues thrown up by RSS and aggregation over the next 18 months will, I believe, find themselves in a much, much healthier shape to face the next set of challenges that the internet throws our way.” (from RSS and News Aggregators, Opportunity or Threat?)

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I’m really pleased to be be able to tell you that Robin Good has agreed to join BlogBridge’s Advisory Board. Robin is an influential online publisher and new media communication expert. He the guy behind MaterNewMedia.org, as well as the editor of Kolabora, a blog about online collaboration, and MasterViews International, a blog about effective powerpoint presentations for International Audiences.

MasterNewMedia especially is an amazingly prolific source of reviews of technologies, companies connected to human communications. Robin also shares his expertise with our users by being a BlogBridge Topic Expert in Collaboration and Web Conferencing, as well as in the arena of Visual Presentations and PowerPoint.

And here’s our good fortune: Robin likes BlogBridge so much that he’s become part of our Advisory Board. There he joins the illustrious David Weinberger, who’s been with us from the very start.

What is our Advisory Board all about? Actually it’s quite informal - consisting of the occassional email discussion and Skype conference call where we describe our latest hair brained scheme and David and/or Robin shoots holes in it. At this point it consists of these two gentlemen, both highly influential thinkers and writers in the space that BlogBridge is focused on. And of course, nice guys who are generous with their time and advice, for which I am very grateful.

As they say, Robin, welcome aboard!

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I just came across BlogPulse2RSS:

“BlogPulse2RSS/1.01 provides a free BlogPulse-to-RSS interface. Enter your Blog URL and you’ll receive a custom RSS 2.0 feed with the results from BlogPulse Profiles. I’ve written this tool before I went to sleep last night and haven’t had the chance yet to test this very thoroughly. So feel free to provide your comments. :)” (from BlogPulse2RSS)

Try it in BlogBridge, it’s pretty cool! For example, drag and drop this link into BlogBridge to see how we are rated, and drop this link into BlogBridge to see how one of my favorite blogs is rated.

Should this become a built-in SmartFeed do you think?

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, RSS, smartfeeds

• Added multi-feed and multi-guide operations support
• Improved feed activity view component
• Added more useful shortcuts
• Added Google Blogsearch support
• Added auto-update facility
• Bug fixes

Today we announce another weekly build (2.2) with lots of tasty features. This time we have focused mainly on the updates to user experience as well as on usual fixes and tune-ups.

We had many questions why BlogBridge doesn’t support multiple selections and requests to add this feature. Well, here we go. I must admit that our multi-selections support a little bit fresh and that’s exactly why we call the whole thing as “weekly build”. So feel free to send us your comments and suggestions.

Next, the activity control was slightly improved and some additional feed list view customization options were added to the “Preferences->Display Options” page.

There’s one new keyboard shortcut available — CTRL-SPACE. It marks current feed as read and jumps on to the next unread article. Pretty convenient, isn’t it?

No doubts, all of you heard about new Google’s initiative — Google BlogSearch. It was presented on August 14 and helps users to find blogs on their favorite topic. The BlogBridge is the first application supporting this wonderful new blog search engine! Just check out new SmartFeed type — Google BlogSearch — to feel the power at your fingertips.

As you probably know, we aren’t really happy with Java Web Start installation and updates capabilities. Some while ago we’ve decided that we have to build our own updates framework and this weekly release starts a new age in BlogBridge distribution program. From now on, we plan to distribute final versions as full downloadable packages only and weekly builds stick with Java Web Start technology to leave the interim updates speedy. We have already added the checks for available updates to the application code. Every time you start application, it contacts our site to learn if there are some final versions available for download. Of course you can disable this through the preferences but I strongly suggest you to leave it enabled in order to stay in touch with the latest news. You can check for available versions at any time with manual command “Check for Updates…” (Tools menu). Today we have no new final versions deployed and that’s why you won’t see anything happening. When we will, the results are going to be presented in a cute dialog box where you can examine what exactly has changed from your current version and select packages to download and install. Of course you can choose to hold on with upgrades — it’s always up to you.
Other than that, we have fixed lots of lockups, improved database operation speed, fixed rendering of some feeds and articles and made lots of other small yet necessary things to make your reading life smoother and comfortable. Please enjoy!

Traditionally, here’s the link to Weekly Build

Enjoy your time and stay with us!

Many people are familiar with Richard’s personal blog, Read/Write Web where he’s been writing about Web 2.0, one of those phrases that has an intuitive ring to it, but still some disagreements on what exactly it means

Here are our latest BlogBridge topic expert’s recommendations on the best of the best on Web 2.0:

• TechCrunch: An excellent site that tracks Web 2.0 developments. It regularly profiles new Web 2.0 companies, making it a valuable resource. TechCrunch also has a weekly news feature called ‘Web 2.0 This Week’.
• John Battelle: One of the people behind the Web 2.0 Conference, from which the term ‘Web 2.0′ was derived. John’s blog is an essential source of news and analysis, particularly related to the big search companies.
• O’Reilly Radar O’Reilly Media is the company that coined the term ‘Web 2.0′ and they co-host the conference with Battelle. O’Reilly Radar is a group blog by some high profile O’Reilly staff and it’s a great source of developer news and trend analysis.
• Bokardo: Joshua Porter’s thought-provoking blog about Interface Design and Web 2.0. Joshua and I are co-writing a book for O’Reilly Media on (you guessed it!) Web 2.0.
• Designing for the Sandbox:
  
  Peter Merholz’s Web 2.0 blog about issues of openness, control, trust, authencity.
• Planet Web 2.0: Aggregates the weblogs of the Web 2.0 community. A firehose of information, but if you want wide coverage of Web 2.0, this is a useful feed to subscribe to.
• Read/Write Web: Can’t resist tooting my own horn My blog was the first to focus on Web 2.0, well before the term got hyped. One of the popular features of my blog is my ‘Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up’ - a weekly column in which I analyse the latest Web 2.0 news and trends. I also have a new ZDNet blog: Web 2.0 Explorer

A note about BlogBridge Topic Experts: BlogBridge’s mission is to help you find and use the best information available from the blogs and feeds.  We are constantly trying to get experts in one subject or another to join us as topic experts.

The list of recommendations come directly from the topic expert, and is first announced in our blog. At the same time they are added to our growing directory (on the left) as well as integrated into the BlogBridge application as part of our ’suggestion’ mechanism.

Here’s how to start reading the recommendations:

• You can simply use drag and drop to drag the links in the text above (the ones worded like this: “Here is the feed …”
• You can click on the link in the sidebar at the left to locate the announcement for each topic expert
• Or, in BlogBridge, when you “add a feed” or “add a guide”, request “suggestions” and all the recommended feeds for each expert will be available, directly.

Please send all questions, comments and especially suggestions for other BlogBridge topic experts to us at info\at\blogbridge.com. Thanks.

Technorati Tags: web2.0

But, I hope it says something nice

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