• BB - GUI: Opening an article in the browser marks it as read
• BB - Core: Rework of the application architecture to support feature subscriptions

From day one, I have to admit, BlogBridge has been designed as a product to streamline my own omnivorous blog and feed and news consuming habits. Luckily it appears that there are lots and lots of other crazies with similar habits. The same process has led to BB Pub, a fairly significant new level for BlogBridge that we’ve been cooking up. I previewed it in a previous post: BlogBridge for micro publishers, or BB Pub for short.

Let me explain the workflow or scenario that we have in mind.

Many BlogBridge users also publish one or more blogs.In fact they use BlogBridge as their ‘News Radar‘, looking for information or ideas or inspiration that they want to use as basis for their different blogs. They often will set up one or more SmartFeeds to monitor some feeds, looking for certain keywords or authors and when something interesting comes up they fire up their blog editor and write a post.

In some cases a user may have several blogs for different audiences — based on a subject matter, or for a certain client, or for business or product line. And sometimes their News Radars will catch an article which would be interesting to more than one of the audiences. Long story short, this becomes a terribly time consuming exercise.

BB Pub’s features, both initial and coming, are meant to super-streamline that workflow, increasing the quality of life of the user, and the quality of content of the feeds that they curate. One of the centerpieces of BB Pub is a new capability to publish content to one or more blogs or feeds. Those of you who follow our development releases have seen the baby version of this, the “Publish to Blog” command. BB Pub takes this capability to another level.

As you can see from the screen shot to the left, the BB Pub User gets the capability to:

1. Register up to 10 different blogs as publishing targets
2. In one command publish content to one or as many of them as they want
3. To set all the relevant properties of the article, like category, pub date, track-back, etc.

Beyond what you can see in this early screenshot are the further features to follow soon on our roadmap:

1. A new capability in our SmartFeeds to detect and filter out duplicate articles
2. Also the ability to semi-automate this so that whenever a particular SmartFeed detects new content, a new post is proposed for one or more of the target posts
3. As you can imagine, there are lots of interesting areas for innovation in this direction…

Please let us know what you think!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, micropublishing, newsmastering

• BB - Net: Enhanced feed parser to read text from a often-used non-standard place
• BB - RL: Added validation against ‘/’ and ‘\’ in the names of lists
• FL: Converted to support multiple installations on the same code base

If you write or contribute to a blog or publish your work and commentary somewhere then we you will be interested to hear about the BlogBridge Pub Service. Ed: Yes, we did change the name from Pro to Pub after some feedback]

We’ve found that many of our users like BlogBridge for the same reason that we like it: you read (or follow) lots and lots of blogs and want to be as efficient as possible doing this. And why do you read so many blogs? What do you do with all that information and knowledge? Many of you are publishing one or more blogs of your own.

Either you are part of a blogging network, or you publish one or more blogs of your own, or you are creating what we like to call Remix blogs specifically for each of your clients. Whichever one it is, it’s time consuming and error prone.

BlogBridge Pub service is meant to make that overall scan, filter, sort, publish cycle much more efficient saving you time and upping your production.

At the center of Pub is the list of blogs to which you publish, where they are, how you log into them and various defaults. The second major leg in the stool is the Pub “Post To Blog” editor where you can extract parts of posts, add your own commentary, choose categories, dates, etc. and in one step publish several blogs. There are other features to filter out duplicate posts from the sources you scan, another major time waster.

We will always have a base level of the service that is totally free. The Pub level of the service will have a subscription charge. We haven’t settled on the details yet but we are looking at an initial charge around $15-$40 every 3 months, through PayPal.

This is the first in a series of posts introducing this new capability in BlogBridge service, and seeking your feedback. Please post your comments here, or in the forum, or send us an email!

We are lucky to have Al Tepper, who was a leading Green Lifestyle blogger and is now Head of Marketing for the UK’s ‘Ethical Retailer of the Year’ to join us as our topic expert and guide for this community. Check out his new “Green Planet” expert guide” and learn more about Al and see his recommendations.

Here’s Al’s own introduction to the new guide:

“The Green Blogosphere has blossomed in the last two years into a professional and vibrant space dedicated to exploring the reality of our situation and the multitude of solutions to the problems we all face. This guide draws together the best of the green blogs covering business, culture, innovation and news to help you stay ahead of the green curve.”

We continue to actively recruit more and more people with demonstrated expertise (some of them actual celebrities) to join our cadre of BlogBridge topic experts. If you are or know someone who would be interested, please contact us directly via email.

Haven’t heard about them? You can read more about our expert guides in our Introduction to Expert Guides and our original announcement “Of Topic Experts and Topic Guides”. Basically it’s our free and growing library of great, categorized blogs and feeds, and it is our answer to what is the #1 question that we hear: “So this blog stuff is cool, but where do I find one?”

There has been a bit of commentary lately about Google Reader’s cool new feature that allows you to graphically see what feeds you are reading, which ones are updating, and in general how you are wasting spending your time keeping up with the blogosphere.

For example, check out this post from Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO: New Reader Trends page.

This is a really cool idea, which BlogBridge is really well suited for, so needless to say we are investigating creating our version of it.

This is just the famed ‘attention data‘ which has had a lot of hot air but not a lot of actually realized value delivered, right? And the flash of brilliant insight is that the one person most interested in attention data is the owner of the attention data. At least so does the Google Reader feature imply.

You know (us) bloggers are obsessed with statistics - who links to me, who mentions me, where do I rank, etc. And this is just one more ingenious way to scratch that itch. Maybe the Attention data lobby finally has found a real application that people will rally around

IWR Blog really likes BlogBridge:

“… BlogBridge, publisher of a most excellent aggregator (I moved to it a couple of weeks ago after two years with NewsGator) … “

Continuing, IWR Blog says of our Feed Library:

…has another very interesting product for information professionals: its Feed Library. This is a place where specialists can share their links and feeds to key information sources in a very friendly and non-techie way.

Read the whole post!

Information World Review’s blog takes a look at BlogBridge’s Feed Library. It’s really cool to see people really grokking what we are trying to do with that product, and how it’s distinct from our Expert Guides.

David Tebbutt says:

“BlogBridge, publisher of a most excellent aggregator (I moved to it a couple of weeks ago after two years with NewsGator) [emphasis added ] has another very interesting product for information professionals: its Feed Library. This is a place where specialists can share their links and feeds to key information sources in a very friendly and non-techie way.” (from IWR: BlogBridge Feed Library: a shop window for feeds)

• Here you can look at the Feed Library that David built for himself.
• Take a look at IWRBlog.
• Read the complete post about the BlogBridge Feed Library.