This is just cute. I used a SmartFeed in BlogBridge to collect images from a few Feeds that have daily newspaper comics giving me a personalized Comics feed:

Notice that the feed includes comics from both Dilbert and Peanuts, clearly coming from two different places. Here’s the SmartFeed setting to produce a Personal Comic Feed. Very simple. But I thought it was cute:

Technorati Tags: comics, cool, smartfeeds

Both Amy Bellinger and Dave Winer noticed my sentence about ’scaling’ in the previous post, where I said:

“As more and more people both publish and subscribe to OPML Reading Lists, the polling that we are all doing isn’t going to scale.” (from “Reading List Ping“)

Amy said: “Polling won’t scale, Pito says. Apparently that’s the conventional wisdom. Could someone explain why it’s the conventional wisdom so I can understand it?”

Dave said: “Amyloo spotted a feature announcement at Pito’s blog, he says that polling of OPML Reading Lists won’t scale, but it will, and imho it’s the only way to go.”

I was being very vague, and I could also have been wrong.

Let me explain what I meant. If “P” is publishing an OPML Reading List and “S” is using that list for one some purpose — like displaying the underlying blogs in a web-based user interface, or doing some complex analysis of the stuff referenced in the OPML perhaps to populating some big database — then somehow “S”  will want to know when “P” changes his, and vice versa. It’s in the interest of both parties.  If they are cooperating with each other they can agree on way to notify, which is what this ping is about.

If now we are talking about lots of people publishing and lots of others subscribing and we want to cooperate with each other, then it seems like things could get inefficient with all the point to point pinging. So to be clear, the ping idea is purely about notifying that something has changed not about avoiding the need of actually talking to get the changed content.

I don’t have a good answer though to Dave’s point. Why can’t “S” just use HTTP and/or ETags to see if “P”’s list has changed and if it has, grab it and check the differences? It is indeed extremely efficient.

Actually it gets even weirder if “P”’s reading list references (through a url) some other reading list or OPML “X”. Now “X” changes, “P” needs to find out, and “S” needs to find out. It starts looking like a spreadsheet recalc problem.  Pinging won’t help us there at all. Hmm. Needs more thought.

Technorati Tags: OPML, readinglists

The latest BlogBridge development release introduces a new foundational capability, the Reading List Ping. I think it’s an important idea, which was inspired by Ted Shelton  during our collaboration with The Personal Bee (check it out!)

BlogBridge is one of the first aggregators that both publishes and subscribes to OPML Reading Lists. As you may know, you can ask that any Guide in BlogBridge be published out as a as an OPML Reading List to share with anyone. As you may also know with BlogBridge and also some other products you can subscribe to anyone’s published OPML reading list.

So when my Reading List changes and something else is subscribed to it, how does one know about the other?

Today, what happens is that everyone polls any Reading List they want to follow. As more and more people both publish and subscribe to OPML Reading Lists, the polling that we are all doing isn’t going to scale.

With me so far? With BlogBridge 2.17 we introduce the Reading List Ping. With a simple global preference, the user can point to another service who wishes to be notified of any changes in an OPML Reading List. So, instead of having to poll all the time to see if a list has changed, services can now ask to be notified.

It’s a little bit of plumbing that can make a whole class of new applications and services possible. Technically this is really just a baby step. What will be required probably is a third party service that can connect publishers and subscribers, analogous to what we have for RSS Feeds. But for now BlogBridge is taking the first step. Maybe others will follow.

Technorati Tags: lockergnome, OPML, readinglists

In our continuing quest to make BlogBridge the ne-plus-ultra of aggregators (and so much more this latest weekly release includes a new and improved HTML handler which improves the fidelity of stuff you read within BlogBridge. While not in your face, this is a really important improvement. Click here for the complete list of changes.

Click here to download and run the latest weekly development release (on any platform)!

Enjoy and of course, as usual,  use the forum to tell us what you don’t like, want us to add, want us to remove, or how the weather is in your part of the world.

• GUI: Improved floating images rendering
• GUI: Fixed switching to anti-aliasing mode under some Java 1.5 builds
• GUI: Re-enabled main window size and state saving/restoring
• GUI: Fixed visual glitch when resizing feeds panel
• GUI: Added brief extended syntax description
• Net: Added pinging of some URL on reading list publication. (see Preferences->Guides)
• Core: Improved internal database stability
• Sync: Disabled content font synchronization to avoid conflicting situations when some font is missing on the other side
• Core: Fixed showing End User License Agreement from About box

Our friends at The Otter Group have put together an excellent BlogBridge tutorial in the form of a 7 minute Screen cast/Podcast/Video Podcast (not sure anymore what the right term is) designed specifically for viewing on iPods!

This basic introduction to BlogBridge was written as one of The Otter Group’s excellent Learning 2.0 Tip of the Week Series. You should subscribe to the whole series in iTunes, that way you will see each episode as it comes out!