Corante recently launched TheCoranteNetwork (that’s how I think they spell it From what I can  understand, these are a series of themed ‘hubs’ - the first three are on Media, Web and Marketing. There are more to follow. What’s a hub? Here’s how Francois describes them:

“With this in mind, we recruited a network of existing top-notch bloggers in the areas of marketing, media, and web technology, to act as reader’s filter for what’s important in those fields. These experts continue to blog on their own blogs. At the Corante Hubs we aggregate their content and enhance it with technology to help readers track “conversations”, and find related content.

We also recruited knowledgeable editors for each hub, who editorialize what happens on the network—sometimes making connections that readers may have missed , sometimes taking the topics in a broader context” (from Emergence Marketing)

To me they look like topical portals, focused on a specific subject matter, ‘hosted’ by an actual editor with a personality and a reputation in the field, and then further combined with various cool tools that allow the viewer to delve deeper.

A very neat idea and nicely executed. Congratulations! (By the way, Francois is a member emeritus of the BlogBridge team)

And, like a good blog-izen, each Hub also publishes it’s source list, as an OPML link (essentially a reading list) which will allow BlogBridge users to directly tap into the information in each hub with our soon to be released Reading List feature, thereby adding it to their overall early warning system. Cool!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, OPML, corante, readinglists

I went back and forth like 4 times about whether to continue the geeky OPML posts here or at my personal blog www.salas.com. On the one hand, it’s probably of no interest to BlogBridge users and so would just take up valuable space here. On the other hand, my interest in this is clearly connected to BlogBridge and this debate will affect the evolution of BlogBridge.

Anyway, if you are interested in the topic, please check out my new post:

“My top level question to those of us responsible for OPML import and export within Aggregators of all kinds, what do you think? Shall we try to do this? Is it a good idea? Or shall we all just create our little parochial namespaces with different words for the same thing?” (from Pito’s Blog)

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, OPML

John T of Library clips continues his interesting set of posts regarding OPML and Reading Lists. He asks some good questions, some of which we’ve also thought a good deal about, and have, at least tentative answers to at least for BlogBridge. {If you aren’t as obsessed with Reading Lists as I am, this might be slightly, ahem, esoteric

One set of potential issues lies in the fact that a reading list is dynamic and so feeds can appear and disappear based on what the owner of the list does. How does that affect the user of the list? What if the list suddenly removes a feed that I had grown fond of? What on the other hand if the reading list includes feeds that I have decided I don’t like?

Our plan for BlogBridge is to give the user control: they can choose to have their view of the reading list silently mimic all changes — or BlogBridge can alert them to changes and give them a chance to accept or reject them.

The second set of questions is about the creation of Reading Lists. In other words, for me to use a Reading List, someone else has to have created it (at least for this to be at all interesting.) How does that happen? Well there are of course various specialized tools to create OPML files and to create Reading Lists specifically.

Our plan with BlogBridge is to provide that capability natively! Very simple. A simple command will create (i.e. “publish”) a reading list based on any existing BlogBridge guide. Dynamically. In fact we will host it for you - provide a hyperlink to the OPML that you can give to all your friends. Actually we will even provide a catalog if you want to publish it to the world.

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, OPML, readinglists

Steve Hall runs the very popular Adrants blog (ranked the 215th most popular of all blogs according to Feedster and 250th by Technorati, if you care about that kind of thing.)

Steve has done time in media, account management and new business. Prior to publishing the award- winning Adrants, Hall held management positions at LEO BURNETT, STARCOM/MEDIAVEST,  BLACKSHEEP MARKETING, so, he knows this space

Without further ado, here are Steve’s selections for the top Advertising related blogs:

• The Spunker - “Nipping and Tucking the Phat of the Adland”, click for rss feed
• AdFreak - “AdWeek’s Take on Advertising, Blog-Style”, click for rss feed
• Adrants - “Marketing and Advertising News With Attitude”, click for rss feed
• Adland - “The Most Complete Collection of TV Spots Along With Creative Commentary”, click for rss feed
• Jaffee Juice - “Insightful Marketing Commmentary”, click for rss feed
• Adverblog - “An International Perspective on Advertising”, click for rss feed

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: “Click for rss 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: blogbridge, advertising

It’s time for the periodic, slightly-embarrassing, but you-still-have-to-do-it, Dept. of Shameless Self-promotion:

(Before launching into it, let me give a plug to BlogLines “Citations” feature, which makes it easy to keep up with what’s going on!)

• On Library Clips, JohnT notices what we are doing with Reading Lists, and gives a nice compliment to BlogBridge.
• ThoughtPixels likes BlogBridge as a crossplatform blog reader.
• I’ve noticed lots of early morning (for me) downloads of BlogBridge correlated with many mentions of BlogBridge in the Spanish speaking world. Maybe there’s a connection? Gracias!
• Ashutosh has an interesting comparison between RSS Bandit and BlogBridge
• And finally, our own Kevin Yank got interviewed on the topic of “Even More Firefox Secrets Revealed” and mentions in passing that “If you are a complete info junkie like me, you might need a completely separate program for reading RSS, like BlogBridge or FeedDemon.”

Technorati Tags: blogbridge

It’s really excellent that there is a move afoot to re-converge the OPML standard. We use OPML extensively in BlogBridge, both for import and export, for internal synchronization, and very soon, for the support of Reading Lists, so this is something of direct interest to us.

There’s been a lot of discussion about this in various places, notably Dave Winer’s opml.com site, and also by Nick Bradbury (see this and this) of FeedDemon (a very worthy competitor). I thought it was a good time to talk a little bit about how BlogBridge uses OPML and what our thoughts are about this question.

Up to now our modus operandi has been to be able to successfully accept OPML from any other sources we came across and as a result we had to be quite ‘liberal‘ in what we accepted; we will continue to do that, but it will of course be very nice if the OPML we generate also comply with the standard and pass approval of the validator that David Winer is working on.

It would seem that a key question is, what attributes should be part of the core standard and which ones in an application-specific namespace.

I guess everything that makes any sense at all to use for interchange between products should be in the core standard, and name spaces should be reserved for product or application specific features. I am not (by a longshot) an expert in designing XML standards, so I apologize ahead of time for any boneheaded comments.

Notice that among the standard attributes, below, we include a series of PROPOSED ones which seem to have reasonable meaning across products. These are of course simply proposals - we could as easily put them in the bb: name space if that turned out to be better.

Standard (Core) attributes

So, here are the attributes that seem to me to belong in the standard itself. Note some are marked “PROPOSED” because currently they are not in the standard, and BlogBridge would use them if they, or something like them, was included.

Attributes for Non-leaf-nodes (i.e. folders)

• text - the text name.
• icon - url to an icon to display with the folder (optional, PROPOSED)

Attributes for leaf-nodes (i.e. feeds)

• type: rss (for actual feeds), opml (for urls to another opml file),
• text - the name of the feed
• for type=rss
• xmlUrl - XML URL of a feed (i.e. Rss, Atom, etc.)
• htmlUrl - HTML URL of a feed (i.e. the actual site, if known)
• limit - a number of items or articles to tell an aggregator how manyto save (PROPOSED)
• rating - a number [range tbd] indicating some kind of a user rating. (In BlogBridge we use zero to 4) (PROPOSED, optional)
• customTitle - custom title set by user (PROPOSED, optional)
• customCreator - custom creator set by user (PROPOSED, optional)
• customDescription - custom description set by user (PROPOSED, optional)

for type=opml

xmlUrl - XML Url to another OPML file

for type=query

• xmlUrl - XML URL of a feed (i.e. Rss, Atom, etc.)

BlogBridge application-specific namespace

And then within the BlogBridge name space, we would have the following, because they don’t seem to have clear counterparts that would be useful for interop:

for type=rss

• bb:icon - a text identifier for an internal icon
• bb:readarticles - the coma-separated list of 8-hex-digit hash codes of articles (optional)
• bb:tags - list of associated tags (optional)
• bb:tagsDescription - short description of tags (optional)
• bb:tagsExtended - extended description of tags (optional)

for type=query

• bb:query - string representation of a feed query
• bb:queryType - type of a query (BB-specific query ID)
• bb:queryParam - parameter for the query
• bb:XML URL to extract data out of BB (optional)

Please use the BlogBridge forum topic for further comments on this post. It will be easier to keep straight there than here.

Technorati Tags: aggregators, OPML

We are actively working on (IMHO) a really cool new capability in BlogBridge — Reading Lists. There has been a bit of writing about Reading Lists recently (not that it’s a new idea) but in case you don’t know what it is, here’s my definition:

A Reading List is a collection of Feeds maintained by one party for the benefit of another. That’s all there is to it. So your Blogroll is kind of a reading list, as is one of our BlogBridge expert lists. As it turns out there are already various people around the Blogosphere maintaining reading lists. A reading list is known by its hyperlink (URL.)

We are building BlogBridge’s reading list in two steps, one after the other. The first step is to add the ability for one person to monitor/follow/see/use a reading list that exists somewhere on the web. Here’s how it will work.

Any BlogBridge ‘guide’ (which is like a folder to you non-BlogBridge users) can be automatically be populated with all the feeds mentioned in someone else’s reading  list.

You can see that all we’ve done is to add a ‘reading list’ tab to a guide where you can see what reading list is being followed, when it last changed, and where it lives.

More advanced users will have good control over the behavior of reading lists - how often to check whether they’ve changed, what to do when a change is detected, and so on. We have added a new tab to our Preferences… dialog box for this purpose. Take a look at the image to the right, it should be farely self explanatory.

In the near future I will describe the second step, which is the ability to author or create a reading list. Please let us know what you think of this approach - and how you would use it!

Technorati Tags: aggregators, blogbridge, readinglists

I just came across Paul Stamatiou’s blog where he has an extensive introduction and tutorial for using RSS:

“RSS has become a valuable technology for everything from casual web users to webmasters. According to a recent Yahoo survey only 12% of internet users are aware of RSS and a mere 4% have knowingly used RSS. RSS exists as a means to gather and display information quickly and easily. By the end of this article, you should know what RSS is and how to use it to make your life easier.” (from How To: Getting Started with RSS)

Technorati Tags: RSS

If you want to follow our new BlogBridge forum directly from within BlogBridge, then here is a RSS feed which shows the headlines of recent comments to the forum. (Thanks to Marjolein Hoekstra!) By the way you should be able to drag the link from here directly onto the Feed list in BlogBridge.

Even though it’s been open for just a few days, the forum is already quite active and has been helpful in letting us give our users better support. If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out!

One goody in the new “weekly release” BlogBridge 2.8 is a direct integration of the Help/Send Us Feedback… command. The feedback entered here by any user will be directly submitted to the Forum for everyone’s benefit.

Technorati Tags: blogbridge

Greetings to everyone! The new version of BlogBridge weekly build has just been released. The versions 2.8 features a lot of changes of different scale and importancy. The most noticable changes are:

• GUI: Added protective menu to all Unread Buttons in Feeds and Guides lists. The popup menu can be disabled with option on the Advanced Preferences page.
• GUI: Added correct wrapping of images with text for better articles rendering.
• GUI: Added small/large icons selector for more compact Guides list (see Advanced preferences)
• GUI: Added options to show/hide icon, text label and unread feeds counts in the Guides list.
• GUI: Added automatic pasting of an URL from system clipboard to the address field in the new subscription dialog box.
• GUI: Fixed some Guides drag’n'drop issues.
• GUI: Fixed several problems with images cache.
• GUI: Fixed issue with images stopping to load after some time.
• OPML Import: Added support for �feed://…� type of links.
• Core: Fixed several serious memory leaks.
• Core: Switched off using a network-based single instance detection. From now on Norton Antivirus will not blame us for having trojans inside.
• Service: Added integration with new forum. Now all feedback messages are sent to the forum directly.
• Networking: Added �Go Offline� / �Go Online� commands to control network activity. (See Tools menu or click over connection icon � right most in the status bar).

The Weekly Build is accessible only through Java Web Start installation link. If you are already running our Weekly Build it will updated upon the restart.

Have a good time reading with BlogBridge!