I will be in Phoenix Arizona next Tuesday (a week from today) and am inviting you to join me for a couple of hours of b-s-ing on blogging, web 2.0, and all topics geekish, including of course BlogBridge. If you want to share some ideas or share a beer, let me know and I will add you to the list. Further details here.

Technorati Tags: meetup, phoenix

I’ve been carrying on and on about Reading Lists, so I thought it was time to step back and quickly review what they are and why I am so excited about them.

As far as I know, the term and concept of Reading Lists (as applied to collections of RSS Feeds) was invented by none other than Dave Winer. And the enabling format, OPML, also a Winer invention. I first heard the term from him several years ago and liked it in principle but didn’t really know how to use them in practice. Here’s Dave’s description from back in January 2004:

“One of the innovations flowing out the Share Your OPML site is the idea of reading lists. An expert in a given area puts together a set of feeds that you would subscribe to if you want a balanced flow of information on his or her topic of expertise. You let the expert subscribe to feeds on your behalf.” (Read the whole thing)

So, a Reading List lets one person select and share a collection of feeds. For example, here is Kathleen Gilroy’s Reading List on what she calls Web 2.0. Now if you click on that link you get a bunch of indecipherable OPML stuff. You need a tool, like BlogBridge to both create and subscribe to Reading Lists.

With a tool like that, anyone out there who knows Kathleen and respects her opinion on Learning would be interested in her Reading List, and maybe read the same feeds. And as she decided to tweak her list, they’d like to hear about that too.

Kathleen has become a Feed Jockey!

(By the way, here’s Kathleen’s post explaining Reading Lists, which is probably clearer than this one

Reading Lists allow a kind of grass roots expertise sharing or editorializing specifically in the blogosphere or more broadly, the feedosphere.

So imagine a world in which all sorts of experts: on topics grand and trivial are able to share with their readers their recommended feeds on this or the other thing. And that there was a way for anyone to find out these recommendations and directly subscribe to them to follow them as they changed.

Some of the pieces like OPML, have been in place. More recently, aggregators like BlogBridge have added to the puzzle.  However there are still pieces missing and it’s still too hard to do.

There’s more work to be done!

Technorati Tags: davewiner, OPML, readinglists

I’m attending the Demo conference in a couple of weeks in Phoenix Arizona. Demo is a really great conference where new companies are hand picked to launch their products. Excellent and recommended!

I thought it would be fun to meet up with any geeks or proto-geeks in the area who want to spend an hour or two over beers and snacks talking about Web 2.0, Blogging, Wikis, Aggregators, and all that kinda stuff.

If you’re around there and want to join, send me an email and I will put together the list and find us a place to hang out.

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, democonference, geekdinner, meetup, phoenix

Arizona Auto Insurance Quote fast, free car insurance quotes

I’m really excited to be able to announce a major step in BlogBridge support of Reading Lists.

Yes, with today’s Weekly Release, BlogBridge can now be used to publish Reading Lists!

All you have to do is to mark a particular BlogBridge Guide as “published”, do a Sync, and voila, your Guide is now a reading list available to the whole internet. Only you know the URL, so you can decide who to tell about it.

Let me do this step by step.

Step 1. Select the BlogBridge Guide which you would like to publish as a reading list, and call up the Properties… dialog box (it’s on the context menu.) You will notice a new tab on this dialog box, called “Publishing”. On that tab, simply check “Enable Publishing” and give your new reading list a name.

Step 2: Synchronize with the BlogBridge Service, the way you normally do. Note that you need an activated BlogBridge service account to make this work. Of course, it’s (still) free.

Step 3: There is no Step 3.

At this point, your Reading List is published on the web.

You can determine its hyperlink by calling up the Guide Properties again, and you will see the Publication URL and Publication Date. You can click the Copy button to put the URL on your clipboard so you can email it to all your friends.

Please play with this and let us know how it goes. Feedback is essential at this point!

Here are some URLs to the Reading Lists that I published.

• My own Best Bets List
• My list of Macintosh Related Feeds
• My Feeds on “probation” - found them, don’t know yet if I like them

To drive the point home: These links are to standard OPML Reading Lists. They can be used with any tool that can use OPML. Whether it be outline editors, OPML crawlers, or, yes, BlogBridge. You can obviously use them as Reading Lists yourself. You can create a Guide, right now, and use the Reading List that I just published, to populate your Guide.

As usual, remember that Version 2.12 is a “Weekly” (development) release. It’s quite solid but not bulletproof. Those of you running the weekly release will get an automatic upgrade. If you are running the stable release and are interested in trying the weekly release, see below.

Please play with the new stuff and let us know how it works, how it breaks, what you like and what you hate. We aim to please!

• Link to Weekly release
• Link to complete change history
• Link to explanation of different release types

Technorati Tags: OPML, readinglists

Users who are using the Weekly release and want to switch to the Stable release or vice versa will see that each release is completely separate on their computers. So the collection of Guides and Feeds in one will not automatically appear in the other.

The easiest way to synchronize them is with the BlogBridge Service. Here’s what you do:

1. In BlogBridge where you have the Guides and Feeds set up as you want them, do a Synchronize Now command (on the Tools menu.)
2. Exit BlogBridge and run the other release of BlogBridge. Again go to the Tools menu, but this time choose “BlogBridge Service” to bring up the dialog box.
3. In the dialog box, next to the “Synchronize Now” button you will see a “More…” button. Click on that button and choose “Only Load”. This will copy your complete context into BlogBridge.

Note: Naturally you can use this same technique to keep BlogBridge in sync between two different computers.

Note: You need to have an activated BlogBridge service account in order to be able to Synchronize. Luckily, so far, this account is free

• Added Publishing support for Reading Lists
• Significant synchronization enhancements
• Fixed several problems with links case-sensitivity
• Improved performance of some operations over the guides
• Improved RSS 1.0 support

Jack Vinsen writes about future aggregators:

“I can see them reaching out to other services and pull that information in to the display of articles. I suspect the web-based aggregators are in a better position to take advantage of this than are the desktop based ones.” (from Knowledge Jolt with Jack - “Mashing up Aggregators“)

John Tropea of Library Clips also has some inspirations:

“Either way, ranking items in your RSS reader by authority in the blogosphere or by your personal statistics is another way to read your subscriptions instead of latest entries as they happen.” (from Library Clips - “Authority in your RSS Reader“)

As it turns out, BlogBridge is already experimenting in this area. Check this out:

• When you add a feed to BlogBridge, it will try to rate how good it is for you, and display it as 1 to 5 SilverStarz. One of the factors that will give a Feed a lot of Starz is their Technorati inlinks rating.
• If you ask BlogBridge to analyze a Feed to look to other Feeds it might point to, it is using Technorati, Syndic8 and in fact BlogBridge’s own service to figure that out.
• When you tag a Feed or Article in BlogBridge, it can use Del.icio.us as a place to save the tags
• When you ask BlogBridge for a “SmartFeed” of photos tagged a certain way, or articles related to another blog, it is using Flickr and Findory, respectively, to assist in that query.

So it’s mashing up big time. But why Non-PC? I meant Non-Politically Correct P.C. mashups are web based and use Ajax. I wouldn’t be surprised if the hard-core Mashupees and Ajaxians would quibble.

For BlogBridge it only makes sense to take advantage of the resources on the internet, weave them together with XML-RPC, but hide the whole mish-mash-up from the user. So much that our users are not (nor do they need to be) aware of this.

But it is quite cool, IIDSSM.

Technorati Tags: jackvinsen, johntropea, mashup

Why “The Invisible“? The biggest, most important change in this release is all but invisible to the casual user.

With BlogBridge 2.11, duplicate Feeds are automatically combined together. Meaning: if I add Pito’s Blog to Guide “A” and then add it to Guide “B” too, BlogBridge considers them the same Feed. Marking one “all read” marks both “all read”. Changing the BlogStarz on one changes it in both. They behave as, and actually are one and the same. This little change makes both Reading Lists and Synchronization work a lot better and more intuitively. Please send us your feedback.

Other than that major change, this release has an additional major improvement in Synchronization, which is more intelligent handling of deleted Feeds. No longer should you see a Feed you deleted reappear after a synchronization. Yay! Synchronization is a major feature of BlogBridge, and so we are working hard to perfect it. Please send us your feedback there as well.

So yes, both those changes were big, important, and probably not noticeable to anyone other than hard-core BlogBridge power users. But believe me, your life will be improved. At least your blogging life. Actually, only your BlogBridge life, but you get the idea.

Version 2.11 is a “Weekly” (development) release. Those of you running the weekly release will get an automatic upgrade. If you are running the stable release and are interested in trying the weekly release, see below.

As usual, please keep your feedback coming in: what you like, what you hate, and what you like to eat.

• Link to Weekly release
• Link to complete change history
• Link to explanation of different release types

Technorati Tags: blogbridge

• Reworked the model not to allow duplicate feeds, but share them
• Added tooltips with articles excerpts when in brief view mode
• Added auto-fixing of URL’s when adding Reading Lists
• Added copy function to dragging (CTRL-Drag)
• Improved synchronization between workplaces significantly
• Improved articles link detection
• Improved OPML import
• Improved browser launcher code to start default user-set Windows browser
• Improved navigation speed
• Fixed bug with SmartFeeds unread counters not updating on changes
• Disabled mouse clicks on empty areas below the lists of feeds and guides
• Corrected sorting when “Starz then Alphabetical” orders selected

Here are my few slides for the panel on Wednesday at the Mass TLC Tech Trends Forum, where I will be on a panel on “Evolving Web Tools and Services.”

I thought it would be useful to include the links to all the different sites that I will be mentioning.

N.B. In each case I have picked more or less random examples from potentially infinitely long sets, so bear with me if your favorite one is not listed…

Random Blog examples

• Gizmodo - for gadget freaks
• Becker-Posner Blog - deep legal debate
• Talking Points Memo - topical and timely political commentary
• Jonathan’s Blog - SUN CTO Blog
• Pito’s Blog - My personal favorite

Creating blogs - tools:

• Movable Type - Very popular software to create and host blogs on your own server
• Word Press - Another very popular one. This one is open source.  They too offer a service.
• Ecto - Very nice blog posting tool for Mac

Creating  blogs - services

• Typepad - Very popular site for hosting your blog. They provide all the tools and servers. Very easy.
• Blogger - Another very popular one. This one is free.

Reading blogs - aggregators

• BlogBridge - Obviously
• Newsgator - Very good aggregator, including an enterprise edition
• FeedDemon - Powerful and elegant
• Firefox - Everyone’s favorite browser, with built-in support for RSS
• Safari - Mac OS X browser, also with built in RSS
• Bloglines - Very popular web based aggregator

Blog Networks

• Gawker Media
• 9Rules
• Corante
• Weblogs Inc.
• List of blog networks

Searching, Hosting, ranking, etc

• Technorati - “What are people saying, right now?”
• Feedburner - Great service to host your blog feed, while getting you nice stats.
• BlogPulse - One of many tools that draw graphs of the popularity of your blog

Technorati Tags: blog, blogbridge, RSS