It is common to come across a blogger who thinks just like you do, or who covers a topic you are interested in as well. Wouldn’t it be nice to easily learn what other sources that blogger reads and admires? The best way to know that they respect another blog is that they link to it, right? So now, with BlogBridge 6.3 that information is a single click away.

We call it “Discover other blogs”. Here’s how it works: At any time when reading a blog, if it looks like there’s some interesting topics being referenced, just click the Discover Other Blogs command (on the Feeds menu, or the right-click menu.) That’s all there is to it.

Magically you will see links in the articles get highlighted, some red and some green.

A green highlight means this is a link to some blog that you are already subscribed  to. Not too exciting, just move along.

But, a red highlight means that the author is referencing another blog that you don’t currently know. If you mouse hover over the link you see a cool infobox telling you what we know about this blog: particularly what the title of the blog is and also how many other blogs link to it (a good indicator of how good it is.) 

A simple right click on the link lets you subscribe to the feed so you can start watching it and decide whether it’s a keeper or not. 

This is delivers an end-to-end answer: read a blog, see a referenced blog and it’s readership, and if it looks good, subscribe to it. All in just a couple of clicks. The circle of life.

(Those of us worried about information overload might then follow with a “delete” of the previous blog that actually wasn’t all that good after all!)

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This is another new BlogBridge 6.3 feature. BlogBridge 6.3 is still a weekly development release, so to play with this capability you need to get the weekly development release, which you can learn about here and download here.
 

 

Continuing my introduction of features that are new for 6.3 (and I acknowledge right up front, require a Publisher level subscription) is Sentiment Analysis.

Now in my title I put the word Analysis in “quotes” because true analysis requires a level of language dependent natural language processing which so far is beyond our grasp. But we think what we have is a good, powerful, practical and understandable capability.

The point is simple: we classify all articles as having either positive or negative sentiment. In other words are they saying nice positive encouraging happy things, or evil sucky, mean spirited and depressing things? 

[To have a sense of why this is not something you can do with perfection, even if you are an intelligent human, tell me whether this sentence is positive or negative: “The King is dead! Long live the king!” See, it’s not obvious ]

Articles are marked with a pretty little colored red dot if they are deemed negative and an pretty little green dot if they are positive.

Also there is a filter for showing only positive or only negative articles.

And finally, and most useful, you can write SmartFeeds to pick out positive and negative articles, meaning there’s a new condition that you can include, combining with other conditions, to select for positive or negative sentiment.

So how does all this work? Well you just turn it on, of course, and you are in business. The command can be found on the Tools menu, Settings submenu, Sentiment Analysis. Just click the checkbox and press OK.

If you are not reading English language blogs then you most certainly will have to tune it, and you might want to anyway, by choosing Advanced… from the Sentiments dialog box.

You will see a list of words that we have chosen to correspond to positivity and a set of words that we have chosen to mean negativity. You are welcome of course to change those around to include your own sense of what words are most useful there.

So there you have it. BlogBridge Sentiment Analysis. We hope you like it. Please let us know what you think. We are very proud of it!

As mentioned above, it is one of the various power features that are offered to our Publisher level subscribers. I know everyone would rather have it as part of the basic product, but please understand that we also need to make some money on this project and the best way we know how to do that is to keep on adding value so our users are glad to support our work.

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N.B: First you have to be running the latest ‘weekly’ development release. You can get it by clicking on this link, on Mac, Windows and Linux. Read here about the two different release types.

Second, sign up for a trial account. All subscriptions have an automatic 30 day trial period during which you can get your subscription cost refunded. To see this new feature in action, you need ‘publisher’ level which costs $25/3 months.

If you are new to BlogBridge, you should know that the majority of our functionality is in fact free of charge. You can sign up for a free account. For $5/3 months you get major increases in capacity - we call this the ‘basic’ edition, and for $25/3 months you can get a ‘publisher’ edition.

 

• BB - PTB: Added templates engine with an editor to the “Post To Blog” feature
• BB - Core: Added Sentiments Analysis feature (Publishing level)
• BB - Core: Improved reliability of feeds parsing
• BB - Core: Fixed minor navigation issues
• BB - Core: Fixed odd behavior of the Cleanup Wizard when a guide is selected
• BB - Core: Added “Discover other blogs” command to feeds and articles
• BB - Core: Improved image caching performance
• BB - OPML: Updated OPML export dialog with an extended export option
• BB - GUI: Replaced colors in drop-downs with nicer pastel versions
• BB - GUI: Fixed the layout of the reports dialog when showing long feed / guide names
• BB - GUI: Improved rendering of aligned images and images inside links
• BB - Net: Repopulating own del.icio.us tags on “Get Others Tags”

We just released BlogBridge 6.3 as our next ‘weekly’ release. One major new thing there, for users of our Publisher edition, is customizable Post to Blog templates. In addition to the built-in Full, Brief and Minimal templates, now you can create any number of additional templates.

Let me explain.

The Post to Blog feature closes the loop for prolific micro publishers, making it super easy to use material that you find while reading with BlogBridge, as the basis for your own blog posts. It is a rich and powerful feature.

You tell BlogBridge about the blog to which you want to post. When you read something that inspires you to want to write to your blog, just type “b” (or click the Post to Blog command) and up comes a little blog post editor, pre-populated with whatever you were reading, which you can then edit further and post to the blog.

This feature exists in a simple form for all “basic” edition users, and in a much more advanced form for “publishing” edition users. 

New with 6.3 is that you can create a template for the blog posts that are created. You can have many of them, for example: “News item”, “Tech note”, “Remaindered Links” and so on, each with custom html. 

The screen displayed shows how you create and edit your new templates. Note the use of a series of special variables, where BlogBridge fills in key information from the article that you are quoting.

Check it out, and let us know what you think! 

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N.B: First you have to be running the latest ‘weekly’ development release. You can get it by clicking on this link, on Mac, Windows and Linux. Read here about the two different release types.

Second, sign up for a trial account. All subscriptions have an automatic 30 day trial period during which you can get your subscription cost refunded. To see this new feature in action, you need ‘publisher’ level which costs $25/3 months.

If you are new to BlogBridge, you should know that the majority of our functionality is in fact free of charge. You can sign up for a free account. For $5/3 months you get major increases in capacity - we call this the ‘basic’ edition, and for $25/3 months you can get a ‘publisher’ edition.