SmartFeeds bring something new to BlogBridge, the ability to create your own custom feeds, based on your specifications. Let’s take a step by step look at how to use SmartFeeds. (By the way, if you are familiar with iTunes, SmartFeeds are somewhat analogous to iTunes Smart Playlists.)

Notice the new “Create SmartFeed” button in the toolbar. SmartFeeds, like all Feeds, are organized with Guides, those big icon buttons along the left side of the window. Begin the process of creating a new SmartFeed by simply clicking the Create SmartFeed… button.

This is the Create SmartFeed dialog box. The first choice (”Collect articles from:” )in the dialog is the most important, as it tells what kind of SmartFeed you would like.

Looking ahead, when this dialog box completes, you are left with a new Feed with the specified name (from the “Titie:” field) with articles collected from one of several sources. At a high level, that’s all there is to it.

So really all that is left is to explain the different article sources.

Here’s how that works: Either the articles are collected from among your own subscriptions - that is the feeds and guides that you have chosen and that are currently available to you, or the articles are collected from the whole internet, from the blogosphere as a whole. In the latter situation, BlogBridge is getting the help from any of a number of great web based services such as Technorati and Feedster who scour the blogosphere around the clock.

Here’s a specific example of how to create a SmartFeed that uses Technorati’s Tag searches to find content from across the internet that has been tagged as “Funny.”

If you are interested, you can learn a lot more about Technorati and tagging, In simple terms, Technorati is searching the web for content which user’s have labeled as “funny” and bringing back all those articles for you in the form of a feed.

Similarly, here’s how you create a SmartFeed which uses Flickr’s service to discover photographs that are tagged as being from Iraq.

You will be amazed at how interesting and useful these photo feeds are. And they are super easy to create. Just give it a try!

Finally, let’s describe the fanciest and most powerful kind of SmartFeed. Look at the image on the left: I am collecting all articles, from all the feeds that I have subscribed in BlogBridge, which were rated with 3 BlogStarz, and are unread.

In other words, this SmartFeed will pull articles from any of the feeds that I have subscribed, in any guide, as long as the Feed was rated 3 BlogStarz, and the article unread.

There are numerous useful other variations, for example:

• Show me all articles which mention the word “Microsoft” and are unread
• Show me all the articles that I received in the last 3 days
• Show me all articles from Feeds that I rated only 1 star and were received today
• Show me articles that mention “Iraq” or which are in a guide with the word “Iraq” in the name.

In conlusion: SmartFeeds are a handy (and really quite powerful) way to discover new important stuff in the blogosphere, and then in turn, to help you focus your attention on the stuff that will make the most difference to you.

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