Reading List Support and more
We are proud to announce that BlogBridge Reading List support is available in the new weekly release, which is coming out today. In addition there are several major improvements that might motivate you to try our weekly release, such as much smarter synchronization, a fancier Cleanup Wizard that helps you find duplicate feeds, and fancy wild carding in SmartFeeds. Let’s take a look.
Note: if you are currently running the Weekly Release it will automatically update. If you would like to try the Weekly Release, click here to download and run it.
Reading List Support
When creating a BlogBridge Guide, you can now include a link to a list of Feeds which someone else is maintaining, as OPML of course. With Reading Lists we support a new way to share knowledge: Reading Lists become assets which can be shared, published and have value. A set of recommendations that can be freely shared.
(By the way, Reading Lists are not a concept we invented, in fact, they were pioneered by none other than Dave Winer, several years ago (I can’t find a link for that, but I remember the conversations several years ago about this at the Berkman Thursday meeting.)
How does it work? Simply provide the hyperlink (URL) to the list, and the Guide will include the indicated feeds. And what is cool is that this is dynamic.
So, as an example, consider the Web 2.0 Workgroup. According to the site, it is a “Network of premium weblogs that write content about the new generation of the web” (side note: you guys write CONTENT? you don’t just WRITE? 
At the bottom of the page you see a link to an “OPML feed“. That’s a Reading List!
In BlogBridge I can create a Guide and have in automatically populated based on the list of premium weblogs that are part of the Workgroup. As the list expands, BlogBridge automatically and dynamically tracks it. That’s all there is to it!
Look at the dialog box above. Notice the third column shows how recently BlogBridge has updated the Guide to reflect the latest Feeds in the Web 2.0 Working Group’s lists. The user can control that as well as various other settings. Check it out, it’s cool!
Cleanup Wizard
A perennial problem is that people accidentally add the same feed more than once. Given that the vision of BlogBridge is allow professionals to read, follow, monitor, lots of information efficiently, it is as important to discover time wasting duplicate information. This is where the Cleanup Wizard comes into play. And with Reading Lists, it is more likely that this will happen.
How does it work? Call up the Cleanup Wizard, and click the “Duplicate Feeds” checkbox, and BlogBridge will locate any feed that you are subscribed to more than once, and give you a chance to delete any of them. Of course that’s not all, you can use the same concept to locate feeds that you haven’t looked at in a while, that haven’t had any activity for a while, that you’ve rated a certain way, plus, of course, any combination thereof. Think of it as a pragmatic bit of Knowledge Management.
And that’s not all!
This post has already gone way too long, so briefly, here is the list of other noteworthy improvements for your enjoyment:
- Significant improvements in two computer synchronization
- Tools/Keyboard Shortcuts to easily document our shortcuts requested by many users
- Ability to turn off the Toolbar totally, requested by some users with smaller screens
- Alert the user if they subscribe to a Feed that they are already subscribed to, also requested by many users
- Wildcard support in SmartFeeds
Try out our new Weekly Release, I think you’ll like it!
Technorati Tags: aggregators, blogbridge, OPML, readinglists, web2.0
Firstly I want to congratulate you on your implementation of a brilliant feature in reading lists. This is something that I think is going to be huge.
While it works fine for me with a flat hierarchy (ie. only RSS links in the top level of my OPML file) unfortunately it doesn’t seem to work in a ‘proper’ OPML hierarchy, ie. subnodes with RSS links. Have you plans to make it parse through multiple levels of a hierarchy? I ask, because may of my favourite ‘reading lists’ are already being hosted by volunteers working on the Open Irish Directory project (http://snipurl.com/jxh1) as sub-nodes within the hierarchy.
Keep up the great work.
Comment by James Corbett — December 13, 2005 @ 5:44 am
James, thanks. Depends on exactly what you mean. You see, Guides in BlogBridge are inherently single level. What we do plan to do is to collect all the feeds in the OPML, even if they are in lower levels. Also, by the way, note that there is a settable global limit (I think it defaults to 100) on Feeds to pull in with OPML. Might you be hitting that?
Comment by Pito Salas — December 13, 2005 @ 6:02 pm
Thanks Pito, in answer to your question, no, I just used an OPML file from OPMLmanager.com which was only a few levels and with not too many RSS
feeds.
I understand about Guides being single level and of course it made since all along. But it would be great to see support for pulling in all the RSS feeds from multi-level OPML hierarchies. Any idea when you expect to have the feature implemented?
Comment by James Corbett — December 13, 2005 @ 6:13 pm
Mea culpa Pito, I was wrong. Sorry about the mistake but the first OPML node I threw at the new reading list feature of Blogbridge was managed by a node manager on the Open Irish Directory. However, I have now discovered that his branch of the directory doesn’t contain a single RSS feed yet, just static webpage. Blogbridge tells me “Reading list not found” in this case.
However, I created my own multilevel OPML file in OPMLmanager.com with all RSS feeds and it worked fine. Then I added a few static web pages and it still worked.
Terrific work! I will correct my blog post to point out my error.
Comment by James Corbett — December 14, 2005 @ 2:56 am
I commented on your reading list idea on one of my blogs a good while back. I heard of blogbridge via the blogs of Pito Salas and Jack Vinson. I immediatley downloaded your software and gave it a try.
I am a feed junkie and have no less than four readers on my machine at present. I must confess that your product, due largely to it’s search capacity, rapidly became my favorite.
Kudos!
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